Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/80

 by Lanfranc, who is said to have contributed a thousand marks towards the expense of the building. He placed bells in the great tower, one of which was given by a wealthy Englishman named Lyulf, who sold some of his flocks to buy it, and the other by Lyulf's wife (Gesta Abbatum, i. 60). The monastic reform that was urged forward by Lanfranc was thoroughly carried out by Paul at St. Albans, which under his rule became a pattern of religious order and discipline to all the Benedictine houses in England. Under him, too, the monastery became a place of learning; he rebuilt the ‘Scriptorium,’ assigned to it a separate endowment, so that the scribes employed in it had their own daily allowances, and caused many books to be copied by well-skilled hands. He gave a large number of relics, vestments, ornaments, and other precious things to the convent, and among them twenty-eight fine volumes, besides psalters and other service books. Certain lands that had been lost to the monastery were regained through his exertions, and its possessions were further increased by the gifts of benefactors who admired the vigour of his rule and the reformation that he effected in his house (ib. p. 55). On some of these new possessions—at Wallingford in Berkshire, Tynemouth in Northumberland, Belvoir in Lincolnshire, Hertford, and Binham in Norfolk—he, by the advice of Lanfranc, founded cells or dependent priories, inhabited by monks from St. Albans, and ruled by priors sent from the mother-house. On the other hand, certain of the abbey's lands were lost in his time, some through his carelessness, and others in consequence of leases that he granted without having sufficiently provided against frauds and legal subtleties. He also secretly, and to the great damage of his church, enriched with its property his Norman kinsmen, no doubt relations of his mother, who were unworthy, lazy, and ignorant, some being unable to write. Like Lanfranc, he despised the English monks, and destroyed the tombs of his English predecessors, many of them men of royal race and venerable memory, declaring that they were ignorant and uncultivated. Probably owing to his contempt for the English, he neglected to translate the bones of [q. v.], king of Mercia, the founder of his house, into his new church. Nevertheless, while recording these injuries that Paul caused to St. Albans, Matthew Paris declares that the good that he did to the abbey outweighed the evil. In 1089, probably on the death of Lanfranc, Paul sent the rules that the archbishop had drawn up for the English Benedictines to Anselm, and received his approval of them. When Anselm was appointed archbishop in 1093, Paul supplied him with money, and Anselm is said to have shown his gratitude by contributing to the rebuilding of the abbey. In that year Paul went to take possession of the church of Tynemouth. It had been granted to the abbey by [q. v.], earl of Northumberland, at his request, and sorely against the will of the monks of Durham, who claimed it, and with whom the earl had a quarrel. When Paul reached York, Turgot, the prior of Durham, sent a deputation of monks and clerks, who, in the presence of Thomas, archbishop of York, solemnly forbade Paul to take possession of the church, to which he had already sent a body of his monks. He answered indignantly, and took no heed of the friar's message. While he was at Tynemouth he fell sick, and as he was returning died at Settrington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, on 11 Nov. The monks of Durham regarded his death as a judgment on him for violating the rights of their church (.) He was a typical specimen of the better sort of the Norman abbots of his time, devoted to the monastic life, a lover of literature, a strict disciplinarian, and an able and magnificent ruler, yet with some of the faults of his race, for he was proud, scornful, and apparently addicted to forwarding the interests of his kinsfolk by all means in his power, however unfair to others.



PAUL, (d. 1099), succeeded to the earldom while Orkney was under the suzerainty of Norway, conjointly with his younger brother, Erlend, on the death of their father, Earl Torfinn, in 1064. He was closely related to the reigning families both of Scotland and Norway, his mother, Ingibiörg, daughter of Earl Finn Arnasson, being cousin-german to Thora, wife of Harald Sigurdson (Hardradi), king of Norway, and mother of King Olaf the Quiet; while his paternal grandmother was a daughter of Malcolm II of Scotland. His mother, on his father Torfinn's death, mar-