Movements of Odo in Kent. his own order, one whom he had, somewhat strangely perhaps, honoured with his friendship, acting as a temporal leader in the rebellion against which he had to wield his spiritual arms. It was, it may be remembered, Geoffrey of Mowbray, the lord of the robbers' hold at Bristol, who had rebuked the lamb-like simplicity of Wulfstan's garb.[1] The lamb of Severnside had now overthrown alike the wolves of Normandy and the wild cats of the British hills. But, if Wulfstan mourned over the evil deeds of the warlike Bishop of Coutances, he had no such personal cause for grief over either the sins or the sorrows of another bishop who was meanwhile, like himself, besieged in an episcopal city. That bishop however was not, like Wulfstan, defending his own flock with either spiritual or temporal arms; he was doing all the wrong in his power to the flock of another. The source and leader of the whole mischief,[2] Odo, Bishop and Earl, chose his own earldom of Kent for the scene of his ravages. Our notes of time are very imperfect, and we have seen that there were movements in Kent, movements in which Odo seems to have had a share, much earlier in the year.[3] But it would seem that the great outbreak of rebellion in south-eastern England happened about the same time as the great outbreaks more to the west and north. As the Bishop of Coutances had fixed his head-quarters in the castle of Bristol, so the Bishop of Bayeux now fixed his head-quarters in the castle of Rochester, and thence ravaged the lands of the King and the Archbishop.[4]*
- ↑ See N. C. vol. iv. p. 386.
- ↑ Chron. Petrib, 1088. "Þe wæs ærur heafod to þam unræde."
- ↑ See above, p 29.
- ↑ Chron. Petrib. 1088. "Ðe bisceop Odo, þe þas cyng of awocan, ferde into Cent to his earldome and fordyde hit swyðe, and þæs cynges land and þæs arcebisceopes mid ealle aweston, and brohte eall þæt gód into his castele on Hrofeceastre." This follows at once on the accounts of Roger the
