Notable among these persecuting Bishops of Chartres is Robert of Tours, Cardinal and Legate (1065), who excommunicated a whole parcel of monks because they refused to accept the abbot he wished to force upon them. Then, too, there was Arrald, deceitful and fair of speech, against whom the chronicler is mightily wroth. But the bishop must at least have had a sense of humour. For his dictum was that gold and silver and the precious ornaments of the Church had no place in a monastery; they were only provocative of pride and the occasion of wantonness in the monks. Therefore he would take such things away, to save them from temptation. He remarked, too, that it was a wicked thing for monks to eat fish or the fat of beasts; they ought to eat simple herbs only, and he advised them to strive to be xerophagi, or eaters of dry, plain food. And to help them, no doubt, he confiscated their fish ponds, for he had a nice taste in good fish himself, and a liking for foreign dishes, ‘always indulging,’ adds our monk savagely, ‘his own natural tendency to gormandise’ (ventri suo castrimargiam semper habens vernaculam)![45] But it is the monks themselves who have left us an imperishable tradition of gormandising; even on fast days they would put a fowl in the pot, and salve their consciences with the argument that as birds and fishes had been created on the same day, they might be of the same species; and, as to drink, they were often under the patronage of S. Martin, in cloisters or at the tavern, quite theologically drunk. As early as 847 the councils of the Church were busy with the scandals of monks in inns. And cleanliness of the body they considered to be a culpable vanity, a pollution of the soul.
But, whether Arrald deserved the censure of the monk Paul or not, that kind of bishop was not uncommon in this century. Geoffrey the First, seven years later, was excommunicated for simony and other vices. His simony he had defended with shameless cynicism.
When the King reproached him with having given to others the benefices which he had asked of him, ‘I have not given them at all, sire,’ he replied; ‘I have sold them very profitably.’
But his treason, his adulteries and his perjuries became at last unbearable. Pope Gregory VII. determined to make an example of him. He was compelled to resign his bishopric, and in his stead was appointed one of the greatest of Chartrain Bishops--S. Ives.