Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop
November 17 · d. 1200
also known as Hugh of Avalon, Hugh the Carthusian
Hugh of Lincoln was a Carthusian monk from the mountains of Burgundy who became one of the greatest bishops of medieval England. Brought over by Henry II to rescue the first charterhouse in the country at Witham in Somerset, he was made bishop of Lincoln in 1186, rebuilt its cathedral after an earthquake, and faced down three Angevin kings without fear. He is remembered above all for shielding the Jews of his diocese from massacre with his own body, and for the wild swan of Stow that guarded him while he slept. He died in 1200 and was canonized in 1220, the first Carthusian saint; his feast is November 17.
Hugh of Lincoln was born about 1135 at Avalon, a castle near Pontcharra in the Dauphiné, the Alpine country of what is now southeastern France. His mother died while he was still a boy, and his father, an old soldier, gave him to be raised by the Augustinian canons at Villard-Benoît, near Grenoble. Hugh grew up inside the cloister and took its vows young. But a stricter silence was pulling at him. High in the mountains above Grenoble stood the Grande Chartreuse, the mother house of the Carthusians, the most austere order in the Western church, where each monk lived alone in a separate cell and kept a rule of almost unbroken silence. Hugh climbed up to it, and he would not leave. He became a Carthusian and stayed there the best part of twenty years, and he expected to die there, hidden from the world.
The world came for him instead. King Henry II of England had promised, as part of his penance for the murder of Thomas Becket, to plant a house of Carthusians on English soil, and the little community he had founded at Witham in Somerset was failing badly. Henry sent to the Grande Chartreuse and asked for Hugh by name. Hugh did not want to go. He crossed the sea unwilling, took charge of the ruined foundation, and slowly built it into a real charterhouse, until monks came to it and it stood on its feet.
In 1186 the king wanted him for something larger. The see of Lincoln, the widest diocese in England, had stood empty for years, and Henry meant Hugh to have it. Hugh refused. He would take the office only when the cathedral chapter elected him freely, of their own will and not at the king's command. When they had, he was consecrated bishop, and the hermit who had fled the world became one of the boldest bishops the country had ever seen.
A bishop in those days held his lands from the crown and could be ruined by it. Hugh behaved as though he could not. When the king's foresters ground down the poor under the harsh forest law, Hugh excommunicated the chief of them. When Henry pressed him to hand a fat post at Lincoln to a courtier, Hugh answered that church livings were for churchmen, and refused. When Richard the Lionheart demanded money from the see for his wars in France, Hugh rose in the great council at Oxford and said the church of Lincoln owed no such thing, and he became the first bishop in England to refuse an English king money for a war overseas. He dealt in turn with three kings, Henry, Richard, and John, and not one of them could frighten him.
The hardest test came in the year 1190. As the armies gathered for the Third Crusade, a fever of hatred ran through England, and men who had sworn to fight the enemies of Christ abroad turned their swords first on the Jews at home. The Jews were a small and defenceless people, barred from most trades, tolerated as the king's moneylenders, and easy to rob once the mob decided that killing them was a holy thing. That year they were massacred in city after city, most terribly at York. The killing reached Hugh's own diocese at a fair in Stamford and spread toward Lincoln and Northampton. To shield a Jew was to make yourself the mob's next enemy, and most men of rank looked away. Hugh did not. Where the armed crowds gathered, the bishop walked out to meet them, unarmed and bare-headed, and set his own body between the swords and the people they had come to kill. His chaplain, Adam of Eynsham, who was with him, wrote it down. In Herbert Thurston's translation of that Great Life:
Let us now speak of his courage, when the lawlessness of proud subjects had to be put down, and of the daring bravery with which he threw himself, unarmed, into the midst of a furious crowd of mail-clad warriors. In his own Cathedral of Lincoln, first of all, then in the district of Holland, and afterwards at Northampton, he stood, bare-headed and undaunted, in the midst of a forest of swords brandished by angry men.
The mobs broke before him. He held back the swords with nothing but his office and his nerve, and the Jews under his hand lived.
There is a gentler story from the same years. About the time Hugh became bishop, a great wild swan came down onto the lake at Stow, one of his manors some eight miles from the city, and drove off every other bird on the water. It was savage to everyone who came near it. But when it was carried in to Hugh it grew quiet, took bread from his hand, buried its long neck inside his wide sleeves with cries of joy, and from that day would let no one else come close to him. While he slept it kept guard beside his bed. It knew when he was coming days before he arrived, and it would run through the courtyard to meet him. For fifteen years the swan was his companion. Then, six months before Hugh died, it would not come to him at all, but hung its head in the middle of the lake as though it already knew and grieved.
He kept little back for himself. He tended lepers with his own hands and kissed them, as his mother had done before him, in an age when most people would not go within reach of them.
Hugh died in London on the sixteenth of November, 1200, worn out by his last journeys. They bore his body north to Lincoln, and there two kings, John of England and William of Scotland, put their own shoulders under the bier and carried him into the cathedral he had raised from the ground. Among the crowds that wept for him in the streets were the Jews of Lincoln, mourning the bishop who had stood between them and the sword. He had crossed the sea against his will and spent his whole strength on a country not his own, and he left behind a cathedral rising in new stone, a church a little braver for his boldness, and the memory of a shepherd who would give up his own life sooner than lose one of the flock, even a flock that was not counted his. Twenty years after his death the church declared him a saint, though the poor and the friendless of Lincoln had known it long before.
How we know Hugh is unusually good fortune, because he was watched closely by men who could write. The great source is the Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, the Great Life, composed by Adam of Eynsham, a Benedictine monk who served as Hugh's chaplain and confessor through the last years of his life and was an eyewitness to much of what he reports. Adam wrote in the years after Hugh's death, as the case for canonization was being gathered, and his book is one of the fullest and most vivid biographies to survive from the high middle ages. Alongside it stands a second Life by Gerald of Wales, Giraldus Cambrensis, who lived at Lincoln while Hugh was bishop and set down what he saw, and the canonization records themselves, drawn up within twenty years of the death. For the world Hugh moved in, the chronicle of William of Newburgh supplies the political frame and the anti-Jewish riots of 1190.
The outward shape of the life is secure. Hugh was born at Avalon, near Pontcharra, about 1135; the medieval sources place it in Burgundy, though the castle lay in the Dauphiné, in the mountains near Grenoble. He was raised by the Augustinian canons, entered the Grande Chartreuse as a young man, and served there as procurator before Henry II summoned him around 1179 to lead the struggling charterhouse at Witham in Somerset, the first Carthusian house in England and part of the king's penance for Becket. He was elected bishop of Lincoln in 1186 and consecrated at Westminster that September. He rebuilt the eastern arm of Lincoln Cathedral, which the earthquake of 1185 had wrecked, in the new pointed Gothic manner, the work still known as St Hugh's Choir. He resisted Henry II, Richard I, and John in turn over the rights of the church and the burdens laid on it, and the refusal of a war levy at the Oxford council of 1198 is remembered as the first of its kind by an English bishop. He died at the London house of the bishops of Lincoln on 16 November 1200 and was buried at Lincoln a week later; King John and King William the Lion of Scotland were both present and helped to carry the bier. Pope Honorius III canonized him in 1220, the first Carthusian to be raised to the altars, and in 1280 his relics were translated to a new shrine in the eastern chapels of the cathedral, which became one of the chief places of pilgrimage in the north.
The swan of Stow comes to us not as later folklore but as reported observation. Gerald of Wales examined the bird himself and described it, matching it to the wild whooper swan, and Adam of Eynsham, who fed at the same table, added his own testimony. In Thurston's translation, again, the chaplain writes of it:
While its master slept, it kept guard near the bed, and often caused us great embarrassment. For if we had occasion to pass anywhere near, the swan would raise its head threateningly, and come forward to bar the way. If we tried to frighten it, or use force, it would utter the most hideous cries, so that we were obliged to retire, for fear of awakening the Bishop.
Hugh is kept on November 17, close to the day of his death, in the Roman calendar and in the calendar of the Church of England, which honors him as a bishop and a teacher of the faith. In art he is shown as a bishop in mitre and cope, and almost always with a white swan at his feet, the swan of Stow that became his emblem; often he holds or stands beside a chalice, and in some medieval images the Christ-child appears above it, a memory of the Eucharist he was said to have offered with great tenderness. He is invoked as a patron of sick children and of sick people, and, for the sake of his swan, of swans themselves; his mother's care for lepers and his own passed into his patronage of the sick.
His shrine at Lincoln drew pilgrims for centuries. After his relics were moved in 1280 into the great eastern chapels, the head shrine and the body shrine made Lincoln one of the most visited holy places in England, until the shrines were destroyed at the Reformation. Among Carthusians he is honored as second only to their founder, St Bruno, the first of the order to be canonized; the modern charterhouse at Parkminster in Sussex bears his name, as does St Hugh's College at Oxford. Old dedications across Lincolnshire and beyond still carry the name of the Burgundian monk who came unwilling to England and would not be driven from what he thought was right.
Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis (The Great Life of St Hugh of Lincoln)(Latin, c. 1212)
The near-contemporary Life by Hugh's own chaplain and eyewitness, and the single fullest source: Witham, the see of Lincoln, the defiance of the kings, the courage before the armed mobs in 1190, the swan of Stow, and the death. The verbatim passages here are from Thurston's 1898 English life; the standard modern critical edition is Douie and Farmer's.
Public domain: Herbert Thurston, The Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1898), Internet Archive
Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis (The Life of St Hugh of Lincoln), critical edition with facing translation(Latin, 1961 (2nd impression 1985))
The scholarly standard: Adam of Eynsham's Latin with a facing English translation and full apparatus, the deeper way into the sources for a reader who wants the whole record.
Public domain: Oxford University Press
Primary sources. Nearly everything of substance comes from two men who knew Hugh. Adam of Eynsham's Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, the Great Life, written by his chaplain within a few years of his death, is the fullest record: the crossing from the Grande Chartreuse, the rescue of Witham, the quarrels with the kings, the courage before the armed mobs, the swan of Stow, and the death. Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) wrote a shorter Life of St Hugh of Avalon and described the swan as an eyewitness in his Life of St Remigius. For the anti-Jewish riots of 1190 the essential chronicle is William of Newburgh's Historia Rerum Anglicarum.
Principal edition and translation. The standard modern edition, with the Latin and a facing English translation, is Decima L. Douie and David Hugh Farmer, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis (Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 vols., Clarendon Press, first published 1961 and reissued 1985); it is the scholarly way into the whole record. A free public-domain English life, drawing the Great Life together for the general reader, is Herbert Thurston's The Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1898), borrowable and readable in full at the Internet Archive, and the source of the passages quoted on this page.
Recommended reading. David Hugh Farmer's short Saint Hugh of Lincoln (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), by the co-editor of the Great Life, is the best brief modern biography for a general reader, sober and affectionate; it is out of print, but findable secondhand and through libraries. Richard M. Loomis's translation, Gerald of Wales: The Life of St Hugh of Avalon (Garland, 1985), puts the second contemporary Life into modern English. The collection of essays edited by Henry Mayr-Harting, St Hugh of Lincoln (1987), gathers scholarly studies of his episcopate and cathedral.
Online resources. Thurston's 1898 Life of Saint Hugh of Lincoln is free at the Internet Archive; the Catholic Encyclopedia article at New Advent gives a compact scholarly summary of the life and cult.
S. Hugh, of holy remembrance, was sometime bishop of Lincoln. He was born of the utter parts of Burgundy, not far from the Alps, otherwise called the mountains, and was of noble parentage and lineage, for he came of the knights. And this holy man when he was young and tender of age he was set to school, and when he was ten years old he was put into a monastery for to learn the rules of discipline, and there was made and professed a canon-regular, wherein he lived so devoutly that when he was fifteen years old he was deputed for to be prior of a certain cell and he ruled it in such wise that all thing that was under his governance prospered as well in spiritual things as in temporal things. After this he thought adaunt and put his flesh to more penance, and by the disposition of our Lord he entered into the order of Charterhouse, where he was received, and was there so virtuous in his living, that among the strangers he was so friendly and so well beloved that after a little while he was made procurator of the house. In that time Henry, king of England, did do build and founded a house of Charterhouse in England, wherefore he sent into Burgundy to the Charterhouse for to have one of them to have the governance and rule of it, and at the great instance and the prayer of the king unnethe could he get this said S. Hugh, but at the last by the commandment of his overest, and request of the king, he was sent into the realm of England, and there made procurator of the same house, and there lived a holy and devout life as he did tofore. that he stood so in the king's grace that the king named him to be bishop of Lincoln, and was elected by the chapter of the canons of Lincoln, which bishopric the king had holden long in his hands. And was called thereto by the said chapter, and the bishopric to him presented, which dignity he utterly refused and said plainly that in no wise that he would not receive any pontifical dignity without assent and also commandment of the prior of the Charterhouse, which was consented. And also, the whole election of the chapter of Lincoln to him declared, he took upon him the office and was sacred bishop of Lincoln. And the next night after, he heard a voice saying to him: You are gone out into the health of your people. And after this he withstood mightily the power of wood people that entended to hurt the privilege of the church, and put his body in peril, like as he had despised it, for to bring the church from servitude, and recovered many droits and rights which had been taken away from the church. This holy man made many good statutes and ordinances in his diocese, and went and visited the churches and places of his cure and charge, and lived a holy life. And he would visit the houses of lepers and lazars, and was wont oft to enter into their houses, and by his commandment the women were departed from the men. And all the men that were foul and deformed in their visage, he would kiss of humility. And there was at that time in the church of Lincoln, an honourable man, a canon named William, which was chancellor of the church, a good man and well lettered, and he would prove and essay if there were any elation or pride in his courage, and said to this holy man: S. Martin by kissing of a man that was a foul lazar healed him, and you heal not the lepers ne lazars that you kiss. Who anon answered to the chancellor: S. Martin certainly healed a leprous man by kissing, and this kissing that I kiss the lepers heals my soul. This was a humble and a meek answer. This holy man S. Hugh in all his life was much diligent in burying of dead men, and of his humanity would gladly do the office about their sepulture, wherefore our Lord gave and rendered to him by retribution condign, honourable sepulture; for what time he departed out of this world, and the same day that his body was brought to the church of Lincoln, it happed that the king of England, the king of Scotland, with three archbishops, barons, and great multitude of people were gathered at Lincoln, and were present at his honourable sepulture, where God has showed for him divers miracles. Then let us pray unto this holy man S. Hugh of Lincoln to pray for us.
The defense of the Jews needs a word of care, because it is both well attested and reported at a slant. Adam's Great Life describes Hugh throwing himself unarmed into three armed mobs, at Lincoln Cathedral, in the Lincolnshire district of Holland, and at Northampton, and standing his ground bare-headed against the swords; but Adam does not, in that chapter, name the Jews as the cause. The identification rests on the convergence of place and date with the riots William of Newburgh records at Stamford, Lincoln, and Northampton in 1190, and on Newburgh's further note that it was Hugh who put down a fabricated martyr-cult at Northampton, an act certain to enrage those stirring the persecution. Thurston, editing the older Carthusian Life, judged the connection sound, and modern historians have followed him; the reticence of the chaplain is itself telling of how unwelcome a bishop's protection of the Jews could be made to seem. That Hugh was their protector the Jews of Lincoln themselves confirmed, coming out to mourn him at his funeral.
A word on names is owed here, because the confusion is old and dangerous. This Hugh, the bishop who guarded the Jews, must never be mistaken for the child called Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln, who died in 1255 and whose death was made the pretext for a false and murderous blood libel against the Jews of Lincoln. They are two entirely different people, separated by half a century, and the slander that attached itself to the second is the very thing the first gave his courage to defeat.
Readings for a Renewer of Society
Exodus 3:7–12Psalm 145:1–13vRomans 12:9–21Luke 6:20–38
Almighty and everlasting God, you kindled the flame of your love in the heart of your servant Hugh of Lincoln to manifest your compassion and mercy to the poor and the persecuted: Grant to us, your humble servants, a like faith and power of love, that we who give thanks for his righteous zeal may profit by his example; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.