heir bishop. They had in times
past paid for the king's mantel with episcopal trimmings, and other
prelates had not scorned a little cabbage over this rich tailoring.
Richard cynically expected that Hugh would do the same, but his clergy
knew him better. They offered to find the money. But Hugh, though he
allowed them to do so, would not allow one fruitful vein to be worked.
He absolutely forbade penance fines, lest, for money's sake, the
innocent should be oppressed and the guilty be given less pains than
were needed. Some folk told the bishop that rascals had more feeling in
their purses than in their banned souls or banged bodies. He replied
that this was because their spiritual fathers laid on too lightly upon
the sinners. "But," they pleaded, "Thomas the Martyr, of most blessed
memory, fined sinners." Hugh answered, "Believe me, it was not on that
head that he was a saint. Quite other virtue merits marked him a saint;
by quite another story he won the meed of martyr palm."

Hubert must have felt it more of a financial than a moral victory when
the 3,000 marks clinked in the treasurer's box.

The next battle between these two doughty men (or shall we say systems
of thought?) was fought about Eynsham Abbey. Old Abbot Geoffrey died,
and at his election the Abbey had been under the See of Lincoln; but
since then King Henry had claimed the gift of abbacies, a claim his son
was not likely to bate. A suit with the Crown, Hugh's friends argued,
was hopeless or not worth the trouble; but this argument seemed
sacrilegious to the intrepid bishop. What? Allow God and the Queen of
Heaven to be robbed? Who ever agreed to let Lincoln be so pilled? He is
but a useless and craven ruler who does not enlarge instead of lessen
the dignities and liberties of the Holy Church. He went stoutly to the
contest, crossed and recrossed the sea, and at last persuaded a sort of
grand jury of twenty-four clerks and laymen that he was the patron. In a
year's time he won his case and saw Robert of Dore, a good abbot, well
in his chair. Hugh spent a week with his almost bereft family, gave the
new man a fine chased silver and ivory crook and a great glorious
goblet, and amplified the place with a generous hand.

This was a legal triumph for the bishop, but surely it was a moral
triumph for the _Curia Regis_ to do ample justice to a strong opponent
of the Crown? Of course, nobody wanted another St. Thomas episode again,
least of all enacted against