y you chose, without
our leave, to put our chief forester under the ban, why moreover you so
flouted our little request that you neither came in person to explain
your repulse nor sent a polite message by our messengers." Hugh answered
simply that he knew the king had taken great trouble about his election,
so it was his business to keep the king from spiritual dangers, to
coerce the oppressor and to dismiss the covetous nonsuited. It would be
useless and stupid to come to court for either matter, for the king's
discretion was prompt to notice proper action and quick to approve the
right. Hugh was irresistible. The king embraced him, asked for his
prayers, gave the forester to his mercy. Godfrey and his accomplices
were all publicly flogged and absolved, and the enemy, as usual, became
his faithful friend and supporter. The courtiers ceased to act like
kites and never troubled him again. On the contrary, some of them helped
him so heartily that, if they had not been tied by the court, he would
have loved to have beneficed them in the diocese. But non-residence was
one of the scandals of the age and Hugh was inflexible in this matter.
Salary and service at the altar were never to be parted. Even the Rector
of the University of Paris, who once said how much he would like to be
associated with Lincoln by accepting a canonry, heard that this would
also be a great pleasure to the bishop, "if only you are willing to
reside there, and if, too, your morals will keep pace with your
learning." The gentleman was stricter in scholarship than in life, but
no one had ever taken the liberty to tell him of it, and he is said to
have taken the hint. Herein Hugh was quite consistent. He would not take
any amount of _quadrivium_ as a substitute for honest living, and next
after honest living he valued a peaceable, meek, conformist spirit,
which was not always agape for division and the sowing of discords. He
took some pains to compose quarrels elsewhere, as for instance, between
Archbishop Baldwin and the monks of Canterbury. The archbishop wished to
found a house of secular canons at Hackington in honour of SS. Stephen
and Thomas of Canterbury. The monks were furious; the quarrel grew. Hugh
thought and advised, when asked, that the question of division
outweighed the use of the new church, and that it would be better to
stop at the onset than to have to give up the finished work. But,
objected Baldwin, holy Thomas himself wanted to build t