consequence, lest they should depart, he ordered them into close confinement. He therefore conducted bishop Roger, unfettered, but the chancellor, the nephew, or as it was reported, more than the nephew,[1] of the bishop, in chains, to Devizes; a castle, erected at great and almost incalculable expense, not, as the prelate himself used to say, for the ornament, but as the real fact is, to the detriment of the church. At the first summons, the castles of Salisbury, Sherborne, and Malmesbury were yielded to the king. Devizes also surrendered at the end of three days, after the bishop had voluntarily enjoined himself abstinence from all food, that, by his personal sufferings, he might subdue the spirit of the bishop of Ely, who had taken possession[2] of it. Nor did the bishop of Lincoln act more perseveringly; for he purchased his liberty by the surrender of his castles of Newark and Sleaford.
This transaction of the king's gave rise to the expression of many different opinions. Some observed, that the bishops were justly dispossessed of their castles, as they had built them in opposition to the injunction of the canons: they ought to be glad preachers of peace, not builders of houses which might be a refuge for the contrivers of evil. Such was the doctrine enforced with ampler reasons and discourses, by Hugo, archbishop of Rouen: as far as his eloquence extended, the strenuous champion of the king. Others took the opposite side of the question. This party was espoused by Henry, bishop of Winchester, legate of England from the papal see, and brother to king Stephen, as I have said before, whom no fraternal affection, no fear of danger, could turn aside from the path of truth. He spake to this effect: "If the bishops had in anything overpassed the bounds of justice, the judging them did not pertain to the king, but to the ecclesiastical canons: that they ought not to be deprived of any possession but by a pubhc and ecclesiastical council: that the king had not acted from zealous regard to right, but
- ↑ "Roger, the chancellor of England, was the son of Roger, bishop of Salisbury, by Maud of Ramsbury, his concubine."—Hardy.
- ↑ The author of the "Gesta Stephani," says, the king ordered both bishops to be kept without food, and threatened, moreover, to hang the son of bishop Roger. Gest. Stephani, 944. The continuator of Flor. Wigorn. adds, that one was confined in the crib of an ox-lodge, the other in a vile hovel, a.d. 1138.
