I - General idea of his opposing abuse in all states and orders of men.

Summary

^We have seen Bishop Grossetete hitherto instructing and directing the clergy, and carrying his care and forecast into the sources of clerical education. We shall now see him correcting and reducing those, by authority, who would not conform to these directions. Being absolutely bent on correcting abuses, and these being almost without number, he was obliged to make such continual opposition against them that Matthew Paris compares the zelous Bishop of Lincoln to Ishmael, ‘Whose hand was set against all his brethren, and all his brethren's hands against him.’ There was however this essential difference betwixt our zealous Prelate and the wild father of the arabs,^ that the opposition of our strenuous Prelate was always against evil, or what he apprehended to be so. If in some particular cases he should seem impetuous, the same historian who taxes him with it in certain points regarding the privileges of his own secular, or other religious chapters, ^takes care to excuse him, acknowledging it to have been the effect of his ardent and indefatigable zeal for the salvation of the souls committed to his care.^ For which reason he adds, ‘let none be moved to an ill opinion of his sanctity by certain excesses, which are related in this history, one of which was his vexatious and expensive suit with his canons of Lincoln in his attempt to visit them. The same Robert was also wont to thunder and lighten in a terrible manner against religious men and more so against religious women, fired with a good zeal but perhaps not altogether according to science. Nevertheless I boldly assert, that his virtues were pleasing to God, tho certain excesses were displeasing.’ Others less warm for priviledges than our pious but censorious and ardent Albanian historiographer would Christen the pretended excesses in question by a more soft and honourable name. So far is incontrovertibly certain, that in most of these excesses as they are termed, and namely his controversy with his secular Chapter of Lincoln and some other religious chapters here censored by Matthew, the Bishop of Lincoln was empowered thereto by the religious Pope Gregory the IX before the opposition, and after the opposition was supported in them by the decision of Innocent the IV.