Page:The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon.djvu/14

 memory in the eighth Book of his History. It would appear from this avowal of his parentage, that the circumstance of his being the son of a priest was considered no blemish on Henry's origin; the struggles of the papal court to enforce the celibacy of the secular clergy not having at that time been successful in England. Still, however, our historian seems to betray some personal feeling in his remarks on the act of the synod held at London 1102, which prohibited the clergy from living with wives, "a thing," he observes, "not before forbidden," while he cautiously adds, that "some saw danger in a strictness which, requiring a continence above their strength, might lead them to disgrace their Christian profession." This feeling further appears in the evident satisfaction with which, "despite of any Roman, though he be a prelate," he tells the story of the incontinence of the cardinal who inveighed so bitterly against the married clergy in that synod.

Some passages in our author's "Letter to Walter," translated in the present volume, have led to a conjecture that his father Nicholas held the archdeaconry of Huntingdon, to which Henry was afterwards preferred; for in enumerating the dignitaries of the church of Lincoln, he mentions Nicholas as the Archdeacon of Huntingdon to whom he himself succeeded; though he does not call him his father, probably because he was writing to a friend familiar with his family history. The terms "Star of the church," &c., which he applies to his father in the poetical epitaph composed on his death, seem to imply that he held a high ecclesiastical position; and he again takes occasion to pay a tribute of filial duty in the "Letter to Walter," in which he speaks of the deceased archdeacon as "distinguished no less by the graces of his person than by those of his mind." He then proceeds to give an account of his own appointment, relatmg that "about the time of the death of Nicholas, who was Archdeacon of Cambridge, as well as of Huntingdon and Hertford, when Cambridgeshire was detached from the see of Lincoln and attached to a new bishopric he himself succeeded to the archdeaconry of the two re-