The Feast of St Hugh of Lincoln

In England and in the Carthusian Order, today is the feast of a Saint called Hugh (1140 ca. – 1200), a French Carthusian who in 1186 became bishop of Lincoln, which was at the time the largest diocese in that country. (Image below: part of an altarpiece from the Carthusian monastery of Saint-Honoré in Thuison-les-Abbeville, France, ca. 1490/1500. Like his contemporary St Francis, Hugh was known for his love of animals; he is often depicted with a wild swan which would follow him around like a pet and eat from his hand, not at all typical behavior for those ill-tempered creatures.)

St Hugh was born to a noble family in a village called Avalon in the kingdom of Burgundy, roughly 80 miles to the south-southeast of Lyon. When he was eight, at the death of his mother, his father sent him to be educated by a local community of Augustinian Canons Regular, which he decided to enter in his mid-teens. He was ordained a deacon, and sent to assist an aged parish priest whose church was a dependency of the canonry; he soon had a reputation for being a very good preacher. But he had already begun to long for a more contemplative life when he paid a visit to the Grande Chartreuse, which is roughly a long day’s walk (around a mountain) from Avalon. The monastery was then relatively new, founded by St Bruno in 1084 on property donated by another St Hugh, bishop of nearby Grenoble (1053 – 1132). He entered the community in 1163, and was ordained a priest; after about ten years, he was chosen for the office of procurator, the administrator of all the monastery’s temporal possessions. He would hold this position until he left the monastery seven years later.

Normally, the life of a Carthusian would pass unnoticed by the wider world, but Hugh was a man of noble birth who held an office of high importance in a much-admired monastery, a leading institution of reform in an age of reformers, and was destined not to remain in the obscurity of his cell.

As part of his penance for his role in the murder of St Thomas Becket, King Henry II of England had agreed to establish the first Carthusian house in his country, at a place called Witham in Somerset in the west country, but the project was going forward at a snail’s pace. Henry had heard about Hugh from a French nobleman who had lands near the Grande Chartreuse, and therefore sent a deputation to formally request that he be sent to take over as prior. Against his great reluctance, Hugh was constrained to accept the position by the Carthusian chapter, and thus departed for England, where he would spend nearly all the rest of his life.

The Grande Chartreuse. St Hugh’s native place is on the other side of the mountains seen here behind it.

On arriving at Witham, he found the monastery barely begun, and the local peasants, many of whom had been displaced from the king’s land to make room for it, understandably quite hostile. Hugh was able with great tact to persuade the king not only to fulfill his promise to provide all that was necessary to complete the building project, but also to properly and fully compensate the peasants. The monastery began to flourish, and was often visited by the king, whose favorite hunting grounds were nearby.

King Henry held Hugh in very high regard, as illustrated by the story that once when he and his army were caught in a terrible storm at sea, he called upon God to save them “though the merits and intercession” not of St Nicholas or St Elmo, but by those “of the prior of Witham”, and the storm died down immediately. However, although he had been chastened in the aftermath of St Thomas’ murder, Henry had not really renounced any of the importunities which had for too long characterized relations between the monarchy and the Church. Among other things, it had become a common custom to leave episcopal sees vacant, so that the revenues attached to the bishop’s office would default to the royal coffers. The see of Lincoln had thus been left vacant for all but 18 months of the previous 18 years. St Hugh prevailed upon the king to redress the matter, at which Henry pressured the chapter of Lincoln to elect Hugh himself as their bishop. Once again, this was done very much against his will, and once again, he was obliged to accept the office by the authority of his order.

The Martyrdom of St Thomas Beckett, depicted ca. 1220, the year of St Hugh’s canonization, in an illuminated psalter.

Not at all surprisingly, his tenure as bishop demonstrated the truth of the axiom that power is best given to those who do not want it. After so long without a shepherd, the diocese of Lincoln was very much in need of reform, and Hugh proved to be an exemplary reformer, assiduous in his administration of the sacraments, in his preaching, and in his visitation of his very large diocese, diligent in his leadership of his clergy, and in his care of the poor and the sick. Each year he would make a retreat to Witham Priory, and live for a time as an ordinary monk within the community.

He was known for his good cheer and sense of humor, which is illustrated by an anecdote regarding yet another of King Henry’s intrusions into the life of the Church. It was a common abuse in that era for the nobility to reward their courtiers with lucrative ecclesiastical jobs under their patronage. (Very often, the salary would go to a man with no interest in actually doing the job, who would then use part of it to pay a man of much lower social class to act as his vicar, and do all the work in his stead.) St Hugh refused to seat a proposed nominee to one of the prebends of his cathedral, saying that “the king does not lack (other) means to reward his servants.” Henry summoned him to court, but ordered everyone in the castle to simply ignore him when he arrived. Hugh came upon the king sewing a bandage on his cut finger, and after a few minutes of icy silence from his majesty, remarked, “Now you look like your kinsman at Falaise,” a reference to Henry’s great-grandmother, Herleva of Falaise, who had been the daughter of a glove-maker. The king is said to have laughed out loud at this, and once again, been reconciled with the holy bishop.

In 1189, Henry died, and was succeeded by his son Richard I, known as the Lionhearted; that same year saw the beginning of the Third Crusade, and several outbreaks of mob violence against the Jews in England. On three different occasions, one of them at his own cathedral, St Hugh single-handedly faced down the mobs, and solely by the force of his own authority and personality, cowed them into leaving their would-be victims alone. In 1197, Richard attempted to force the bishops of England to help finance a war with the king of France; Hugh successfully resisted this importunity as well.

A year before his election to Lincoln, the city’s original cathedral had been badly damaged by an earthquake, an extremely rare event in England. St Hugh began an ambitious rebuilding project, and lived to see the completion of the choir, which is traditionally named after him. (From the time of its completion in 1311 until 1549, Lincoln Cathedral was the tallest man-made structure in the world. It lost its rank as such not because it was outbuilt, but because its central spire collapsed.)

Lincoln Cathedral. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Julian P Guffogg, CC BY-SA 2.0. 

St Hugh’s Choir within the cathedral, as it appears today.

When King Richard died in 1199, his brother and successor, John, sent Hugh as an ambassador to France. On this trip, he visited the three great mother-houses of the major monastic congregations, his old home, the Grand Chartreuse, Cluny and Citeaux, and was received with great honor. But his health was now failing; he was taken badly ill while attending a council in London, and died after lingering for two months. His body was taken back to Lincoln and buried in the cathedral, and he was canonized by Pope Honorius III only 20 years after his death. His shrine became an important pilgrimage site, and his feast was kept on this day throughout England until the reformation, when the shrine was destroyed.

In the 16th century, the importunity of the English monarchs against the Church finally reached its zenith, the greed and impiety of another eighth Henry was brought down on all the monasteries of England, and the charterhouse at Witham was suppressed, along with the nine other Carthusian houses that had subsequently been founded. When the order was reestablished in England in 1873, in the southern town of Parkminster, the new house was named for St Hugh.

The Charterhouse of St Hugh at Parkminster. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Antiquary, CC BY-SA 4.0.)