gentle voice, “Dearest son, how is it with thee? Why this face down on the ground? Rise, and please tell thy friend the exact matter.” Hugh answered, “Good father, and my most kind nurser, the law of sin and death in my members troubles me even to the death, and except I have thy wonted help, thy lad will even die.” “Yes, I will help thee.” The visitor took a razor in his hand and cut out an internal inflamed tumour, flung it far away, blessed his patient, and disappeared, leaving no trace of his surgery in heart or   flesh. Hugh told this story in his last illness to Adam, his chaplain, and added that though after this the flesh troubled him, its assaults were easy to scorn and to repress, though always obliging him to walk humbly.

The king’s messengers took with them the Bishop of Grenoble and unfolded their errand. The Charterhouse was horrified, and the prior most of all. He delayed a reply. The first prior refused the request. The votes varied. Bovo, a monk who afterwards succeeded to Witham, declared strongly that it was a divine call, that the holiness of the order might be advertised to the ends of the earth. Hugh was too large a light to keep under their bushel. He seems better fitted to be a bishop than a monk, he said. Hugh was then bidden to speak. He told them that with all the holy advice and examples about him he had never managed to keep his own soul for one day, so how could any wise person think him fit to rule other folk? Could he set up a new house, if he could not even keep the rules of the old one? This is childishness and waste of time. “Let us for the future leave such matters alone, and since the business is hard and urgent do you only occupy yourselves to see that this king’s undertaking be frittered no longer away half done, to the peril of souls and the dishonour of the holy order, and so from among you or from your other houses choose a man fit for this work and send him with these men. Since these are wise, do you too answer them wisely. Grant their desire, not their request. Give them a man not such as they seek under a mistake, but such as they devoutly and   discreetly demand. It is not right that men should be heard unadvisedly who mistake the man of their request and who do not really want to be mistaken in the man’s qualifications. So, in a word, do not grant their request, but cheer them by bettering it.” The prior and Hugh were of one decision. The former declared point blank that he would not say go, and finally he turned to the Carthusian Bishop of Grenoble, “our bishop, father, and brother in one,” and bade him decide. The bishop accepted the responsibility, reminded them of the grief which arose when St. Benedict sent forth St. Maur to Western Gaul, and exhorted Hugh that the Son of God had left the deepest recess of His Deity to be manifest for the salvation of many. “You too must pilgrimage for a little time from your dearest, breaking for a while the silence of the quiet you have loved.” After much interruption from Hugh, the sentence was given. They all kissed him and sent him away forthwith. The king received him with much graciousness and ordered him to be carried honourably to Witham, and the wretched remnant in the mud flat received him as an angel of God. Well they might do so, for they seemed to have passed a melancholy winter in twig huts, now called “weeps,” in a little paled enclosure, not only without the requisites of their order, but with barely bread to their teeth. There was no monastery, not even a plan of one. William FitzJohn and his clayey serfs scowled upon the shivering interlopers, uncertain what injustice might be done to them and to their fathers’ homes, in sacrifices to the ghost of St. Thomas.

Witham is a sort of glorified soup-plate, still bearing traces of its old Selwood Forest origin, for the woodlands ring round it. The infant river Avon creeps through its clayey bottom, and there are remains of the old dams which pent it into fish-ponds. Of the convent nothing remains except a few stumps in a field called “Buildings,” unless the stout foundations of a room, S.E. of the church, called the reading-room, mark the guest house, as tradition asserts. Much of the superstructure of this cannot go back beyond the early sixteenth century, but the solid walls, the small size (two cottage area), allow of the fancy that here was the site of many colloquies between our Hugh and Henry Fitz-Empress.1

The church itself is one of the two erected by St. Hugh, partly with his own hands. It is the lay brothers’ church (called since pre-Franciscan days, the Friary). The conventual church has left no wrack behind. The style is entirely Burgundian, a single nave, with Romanesque windows, ending in an apse. The “tortoise” roof, of vaulted stone, is as lovely as it is severe. In 1760 the Tudor oaken bell-turret survived. The horrid story of how a jerry-built tower was added and the old post-Hugonian font built into it, how a new font was after long interval added, does not concern us. The tower was happily removed, the old font found and   remounted (as if the text ran, “One faith, two baptisms”), and a stone nozzle built to uphold three bells. The buttresses are copied from St. Hugh’s Lincoln work.