his heavy burden of
bishopric and to go back to his quiet cell, the white wool tunic, the
silence, and the careful cleaning of trenchers. The office of a bishop
in his day left little time for spiritual tillage either at home or
abroad. Not only the bishops had to confirm, ordain to all orders,
consecrate, anoint, impose penance, and excommunicate, but they had to
decide land questions concerning lands in frank almoin, all probate and
nullity of marriage cases, and to do all the legal work of a king's
baron besides. The judicial duties lay heavily upon him. He used to say
that a bishop's case was harder than a lord warden's or a mayor's, for
he had to be always on the bench; they only sometimes. They might look
after their family affairs, but he could hardly ever handle the cure of
souls. For the second or third time he sent messengers to ask Papal
leave to resign, but Innocent, knowing that "no one can safely be to the
fore who would not sooner be behind," rejected the petition with
indignation; and Pharaoh-like increased his tasks the more by making him
legate in nearly every important case of appeal. People who had nothing
to rely upon except the justice of their cause against powerful
opponents, clamoured for the Lincoln judgments, which then neither fear
nor hope could trim, and which were as skilful as they were upright, so
that men, learned in the law, ascribed it to the easy explanation of
miracles that a comparative layman should steer his course so finely.

In the various disputes between monks and bishops, which were a standing
dish in most dioceses, he took an unbiassed line. In the long fight
waged by Archbishop Baldwin first and then by Hubert Walter with the
monks of Canterbury, which began in 1186, and was not over until Hugh
was dead, he rather favoured the side of the monastery. Yet we find him
speaking _multa aspera_, many stinging things to their spokesman, and
recommending, as the monk said, prostration before the archbishop. His
words to the archbishop have been already quoted. With Carlyle's Abbot
Sampson and the Bishop of Ely he was appointed by Innocent to hush the
long brawl. The Pope, tired and angry, wrote (September, 1199) to the
commissioners to compel the archbishop, even with ecclesiastical
censures. They reply rather sharply to his holiness that he is hasty and
obscure; and so the matter dragged on. Then in 1195 the inevitable
Geoffrey Plantagenet, the bastard, Archbishop of York, before