d of Canterbury, Hubert the
Justiciar, who was the real King of England and one of the ablest men
the country had to serve her. He felt it right that the suit should
continue. Hugh declared that he had acted as Justiciar, not as
Metropolitan, and suspended Richard, who again went off to Hubert and
got the sentence relaxed, and boasted that he was free from Lincoln
jurisdiction. Hugh simply added excommunication to the contumacious
deacon. Again the archbishop loosed, and Hugh bound. "If a hundred times
you get absolved by the lord archbishop, know that we re-excommunicate
you a hundred times or more, as long as we see you so all too hardened
in your mad presumption. It is evident what you care for our sentence.
But it is utterly fixed and settled." Then the deacon hesitated, but
before he could make up his mind his man cracked open his head with an
axe.

Then again there was a girl at Oxford, who, backed by a Herodias mother,
left her husband for another love. The husband appealed to the bishop,
who told her to go back. She kept repeating that she would sooner die.
Hugh tried coaxing. He took her husband's hand and said, "Be my daughter
and do what I bid you. Take your husband in the kiss of peace with God's
benison. Otherwise I will not spare you, be sure, nor your baneful
advisers." He told the husband to give her the kiss of peace. But when
he advanced to do so the hussey spat in his face near the altar (of
Carfax) and before many reverend fathers. With a fearful voice the
bishop said, "You have eschewed the blessing and chosen the curse. Lo!
the curse shall catch you." He gave her a few days' respite and then
pronounced the curse. "She was suffocated by the enemy of mankind, and
suddenly changed lawless and vanishing pleasures for unending and just
tortures," says the unhesitating scribe.

Once a Yorkshire clerk was turned out of his benefice by a knight (who
was in our sense also a squire) simply that the gentleman might clap in
his brother. The poor parson appealed to Courts Christian and Courts
Civil, but found his enemy was much too favoured for him to effect
anything. He tried Rome, but, poor Lackpenny, got what he might have
expected from that distant tribunal. In his distress he turned to the
chivalrous Bishop of Lincoln. Now, Hugh had no business at all to meddle
with Archbishop Geoffrey Plantagenet's diocese, but it was a case of
"Who said oppression?" He banned the obtruding priest by name and all
his ac