Page:Somerset Historical Essays.djvu/148

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138
PETER OF BLOIS

some substantial preferment in his native land. But in this he was disappointed: he failed to obtain the provostship of Chartres, where for a time he was a canon; and a small prebend which he held at Rouen would seem only to have landed him in debt. In the early part of 1182 he was appointed to the archdeaconry of Bath, which had just been vacated by the promotion of John Cumin to the archbishopric of Dublin. His new office did not remove him from the service of Archbishop Richard: he was with him at Poitiers in the spring of 1183, and back with him at Canterbury in the following August: on 16 Feb. 1184 the archbishop died. Peter became secretary to Baldwin, the new archbishop, and early in 1187 he went to the papal court at Verona, together with William of St Faith the precentor of Wells, in the matter of the great controversy with the monks of Christ Church respecting the new collegiate church which the archbishop was building outside Canterbury. He returned from Italy towards the end of the year. Meanwhile tidings arrived of the loss of Jerusalem on 3 Oct. 1187. The new Crusade had now become urgent, and Peter's pen was employed on its behalf. Early in 1189 we find him with the king and the archbishop at Le Mans. On 6 July K. Henry died: the archbishop hastened back to England, crowned K. Richard on 3 Sept., and on 6 March 1190 departed for the Crusade, never to return.

Peter had thus lost at once his royal and his episcopal patron. He tells us, however, that he left England with the new king (11 Dec. 1190); and it would seem that it was about this time that he was appointed to the deanery of Wolverhampton, which was a royal peculiar. In the following year he had a long illness, lasting apparently from March to October. On his recovery be went to the queen- mother in Normandy, and returned with her to England in February 1192. When she went to Germany in 1194 he seems to have joined himself to the new primate, Hubert Walter. About this time, if not earlier, he obtained a small prebend at Salisbury, and perhaps rather later a prebend at Ripon. Peter's tenure of the deanery of Wolverhampton brought him much sorrow. The scandalous conduct of the canons, whom he vainly endeavoured to reform, led him at last, about the year 1204, to resign his office in order that the church might be given over to a new foundation of Cistercian monks: the project, however, fell to the ground on the death of Hubert Walter, 13 July 1205.

Soon after this Peter became archdeacon of London. He must have been wellnigh seventy years of age, and he suffered much from recurrent fevers. The poverty of his archdeaconry and the invasion