ren, or else did not live long enough to have issue. Hugh married one of the daughters of Edward,[1] and begot Robert; Robert begot Henry; Henry, Philip; and Philip, Lewis, who now reigns in France. But to return to our Edward: I think it will be pleasing to relate what in his time pope Formosus commanded to be done with respect to filling up the bishoprics, which I shall insert in the very words I found it.[2]
"In the year of our Lord's nativity 904, pope Formosus sent letters into England, by which he denounced excommunication and malediction to king Edward and all his subjects, instead of the benediction which St. Gregory had given to the English nation from the seat of St. Peter, because for seven whole years the entire district of the Gewissæ, that is, of the West-Saxons, had been destitute of bishops. On hearing this, king Edward assembled a council of the senators of the English, over which presided Plegmund, archbishop of Canterbury, interpreting carefully the words of the apostolic legation. Then the king and the bishops chose for themselves and their followers a salutary council, and, according to our Saviour's words, 'The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few,'[3] they elected and appointed one bishop to every province of the Gewissæ, and that district which two formerly possessed they divided into five. The council
- ↑ This is a mistake: Hugh is confounded with his father, who married Edward's daughter. There is no notice of this exploit of Hugh's in Bouquet, though Isembard is mentioned as the nephew of Lewis, who, being unjustly banished, returns accompanied by a large body of Danes and Normans, but is defeated. Bouquet, Recueil, &c. tom. ix. 58. Lewis, however, left issue, and it was on the death of his grandson Lewis, that Hugh Capet became king of France.
- ↑ This story of pope Formosus and the seven bishops is to be found verbatim in a MS. (Bodley, 579) which was given to the cathedral of Exeter by bishop Leofiric, who died a.d. 1073. Its difficulties therefore are not to be imputed to our author. But though it may not be easy to assign a rational motive for the invention of such an instrument, it is a decided forgery; and all the ecclesiastical writers, from Baronius to Wilkins, [See Concilia, i. p. 201,] have utterly failed in their conjectural attempts to uphold it: even the temperate, the acute, the learned Henry Wharton [Anglia Sacra, i. 55i, 5], who rejects decidedly the epistle, gives but an unsatisfactory solution of the seven vacant sees. Its repugnancies will be seen at a glance, when it is recollected, that Formosus died a.d. 896; Edward did not reign till a.d. 901; and Frithstan did not become bishop of Winchester before a.d. 910.
- ↑ Matt. ix. 37.
