g from its clothes. Every one else had a gum, an essence or
incense; but Hugh, who was peculiarly sensitive to malodours, showed
nothing but tenderness for the corrupt mortality, and seemed to cherish
it as a mother a babe. The "sweet smelling sacrifice" shielded him in
his work of mercy, they said.

William of Newburgh, a writer much given to ghost stories, tells a
Buckingham tale of a certain dead man who would walk. He fell violently
upon his wife first, and then upon his brothers, and the neighbours had
to watch to fend him off. At last he took to walking even in the day,
"terrible to all, but visible only to a few." The clergy were called;
the archdeacon took the chair. It was a clear case of Vampire. The man
must be dug up, cut to bits, and burnt. But the bishop was very
particular about the dead, and when they asked his leave he was
indignant at the proposal. He wrote instead a letter with his own hand,
which absolved the unquiet spirit. This was laid upon the dead man's
breast, and thenceforward he rested in peace, as did his alarmed
neighbours. Whatever we think of the tale, the tender reverent spirit of
the bishop is still a wonder. Although greatly given to an enthusiasm
for the saints, a puzzling enthusiasm for their teeth, nails, plaisters,
and bandages, Hugh was looked upon as an enemy to superstition, and was
an eager suppressor of the worship of wells and springs, which still
show how hard the Pagan religion dies. He found and demolished this
"culture" at Wycombe and Bercamstead.{17}

The great theological question of Hugh's time was certainly the
Eucharistic one. Eucharistic doctrine grew, as the power of the Church
grew; as the one took a bolder tone so did the other. The word
Transubstantiation (an ambiguous term to the disputants who do not
define substance) had been invented by Peter of Blois, but not yet
enjoined upon the Church by the Lateran Council of 1215. The language of
the earlier fathers, of St. Bernard, did not suffice. Peter Lombard's
tentative terms had given way to less reserved speech. Thomas Aquinas,
not yet born, was to unite the rival factions which forked now into
Berengarius, who objected to the very terms Body of Christ, &c., always
used for the Sacrament; and now into some crude cannibal theories, which
found support in ugly miracles of clotted chalices and bleeding fingers
in patens. Abelard had tried to hush the controversy by a little
judicious scepticism, but the air was fu