Jocelin
2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: British History 1500 and before (including Roman Britain); Religious figures and leaders
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| Denomination | Roman Catholic Church |
| Senior posting | |
| See | Diocese of Glasgow |
| Title | Bishop of Glasgow |
| Period in office | 1174/ 5 — 1199 |
| Predecessor | Enguerrand |
| Successor | Hugh de Roxburgh |
| Religious career | |
| Priestly ordination | Monk |
| Previous bishoprics | None |
| Previous post | Abbot of Melrose |
| Personal | |
| Date of birth | 1130s |
| Place of birth | Scottish Borders or Northumberland. |
| Place of death | Melrose, March 17, 1199 |
Jocelin or Jocelyn († 1199) was a 12th century Cistercian monk and cleric from the Scottish Borders region, who became the fourth Abbot of Melrose and the fifth known 12th century Bishop of Glasgow. He was probably born in the 1130s, and in his teenage years became a monk of Melrose Abbey. He rose in the service of Abbot Waltheof, and by the time of the short abbacy of Waltheof's successor Abbot William, Jocelin had become prior. Then in 1170 Jocelin himself became abbot, a position he held for four years. Jocelin was responsible for promoting the cult of the emerging Saint Waltheof, and in this had the support of Enguerrand, bishop of Glasgow.
His Glasgow connections and political profile were already well-established enough that in 1174 Jocelin succeeded Enguerrand as Glasgow's bishop. It was during the episcopate that Jocelin made his mark on history. As bishop of Glasgow, he was a royal official. In this capacity he travelled abroad on several occasions, and performed the marriage ceremony between King William the Lion and Ermengarde de Beaumont, later baptizing their son, the future King Alexander II. Among other things, he has been credited by modern historians as "the founder of the burgh of Glasgow and initiator of the Glasgow fair", as well as being one of the greatest literary patrons in medieval Scotland, continuing his hagiographical patronage by commissioning a new Norman-style Life of St Kentigen.
Early life
Jocelin and his family came from the south-east of Scotland. Neither the name of his father or mother are known, but he had two known brothers, with the names Helia and Henry, and a cousin, also called Helia. The names suggest that his family were of French, or at least Anglo-Norman origin, rather than being Scots or native Anglo-Saxons. It is unlikely that he would have thought of himself as "Scottish". For Jocelin's contemporary and fellow native of the Borders, Adam of Dryburgh, this part of Britain was still firmly regarded as terra Anglorum (the "Land of the English"), although it was located inside the regnum Scottorum (the "Kingdom of the Scots"). This, however, would be no obstacle to Jocelin; his Anglo-French cultural background was in fact probably necessary for the patronage of the King of Scots. As Walter of Coventry wrote of King William's era, "the modern kings of Scotland count themselves as Frenchmen, in race, manners, language and culture; they keep only Frenchmen in their household and following, and have reduced the Scots to utter servitude."
Jocelin's year of birth, like that of almost every character from this period, is unknown to modern historians. However, it is known that he entered as a novice monk in Melrose Abbey during the abbacy of Waltheof (ab. 1148- 59), and from documentary evidence it seems likely that Jocelin entered Melrose about 50 years before his death in 1199. As the rules of the Cistercian order prevented entry as a novice before the age of 15, it is likely that he was born around the year 1134. Little is known about Jocelin's early life or his early career as a Melrose monk. He obviously successfully completed his one-year noviciate, the year in which a prospective monk was introduced to monasticism and judged fit or unfit for admittance. We know that Abbot Waltheof (Waldef) thought highly of him and granted him many responsibilities. After the death of Abbot Waltheof, his successor, Abbot William, refused to encourage the rumours which had quickly been spreading about Waltheof's saintliness. Abbot William attempted to silence such rumours, and shelter his monks from the intrusiveness of would-be pilgrims. However, William was unable to get the better of Waltheof's emerging cult, and his actions had alienated him from the brethren. As a result, in April 1170, William resigned the abbacy. Jocelin was by this stage the Prior of Melrose, that is, the second in command at the monastery, and thus William's most likely replacement.
Abbot of Melrose
So it was that Prior Jocelin became abbot on April 22, 1170. Jocelin embraced the cult without hesitation. Under the year of Jocelin's accession, it was reported in the Chronicle of Melrose that:
The tomb of our pious father, sir Waltheof, the second abbot of Melrose, was opened by Enguerrand, of good memory, the bishop of Glasgow, and by four abbots called in for this purpose; and his body was found entire, and his vestments intact, in the twelfth year from his death, on the eleventh day before the Kalends of June [22 May]. And after the holy celebration of mass, the same bishop, and the abbots whose number we have mentioned above, placed over the remains of his most holy body a new stone of polished marble. And there was great gladness; those who were present exclaiming together, and saying that truly this was a man of God ...
Promoting saints was something Jocelin would repeat at Glasgow, where he would commission a hagiography of Saint Kentigern, the saint most venerated by the Celts of the diocese of Glasgow. It is no coincidence that Jocelin of Furness, the who wrote the Life of St. Waltheof, was the same man later commissioned to write the Life of St. Kentigern.
This kind of literary patronage started while Jocelin was abbot of Melrose. A.A.M. Duncan has shown that it was probably Jocelin who first commissioned the writing of the Chronicle of Melrose. Duncan argues that Jocelin commissioned the entries dealing with the period between 731 and 1170, putting the writing in the hands of a monk named Reinald. This chronicle is one of the few extant chronicles from Scotland in this period.
After Jocelin's election to the prestigious bishopric of Glasgow in 1174, Jocelin would continue exerting influence on his home monastery. Jocelin brought one of his monks from the abbey, a man called Michael, who acted as Jocelin's chaplain while bishop of Glasgow. He did not resign his position as abbot until after his consecration in 1175. Jocelin consecrated his successors as abbot, and continued to spend a lot of time there. Moreover, he used his position as bishop to offer the monastery patronage and protection.
Bishop of Glasgow
Jocelin was "promoted" to Bishop of Glasgow after the death of his friend Bishop Enguerrand, being elected on May 23, 1174. The election, like many other Scottish episcopal elections of the period, was done in the presence of the king, William the Lion, at Perth, near Scone, the chief residence of Scotland's kings. The election was probably done by compromissarii, meaning that the general chapter of the bishopric of Glasgow had selected a small group to which they delegated the power of election. Pope Alexander III was later told that Jocelin was elected by the dean and chapter of the see. The Chronicle of Melrose states that he was elected "by demand of the clergy, and of the people; and with the consent of the king himself", perhaps indicating that the decision had already been made by the Glasgow clergy before the formal election at Perth. The election was certainly an achievement. Cistercian bishops were rare in Great Britain, and Jocelin was only the second Cistercian to ascend to a Scottish bishopric. Jocelin was required to go to France to obtain permission from the General Chapter of the Cistercian order at Cîteaux to resign the abbacy. Pope Alexander III had already sanctioned his consecration, and gave permission for the consecration to occur without forcing Jocelin to travel to Rome. Conveniently, it was at Cîteaux that, sometime before March 15 1175, Jocelin was consecrated by the Papal legate Eskil, Archbishop of Lund and Primate of Denmark.
Jocelin had returned to the Kingdom of Scotland by April 10, and it is known that on May 23 he had consecrated a monk named Laurence as his successor at Melrose. Jocelin was soon faced with a political challenge to the independence of his church. The challenge came from the English church, and was not new, but had lain dormant for some decades. However, later in the summer King William was captured and taken into English custody after being caught underprotected during a siege at Alnwick. King Henry II of England forced William to sign the Treaty of Falaise, a treaty which made William Henry's vassal and sanctioned the subordination of the kingdom's bishoprics to the English church. Jocelin however was not going to submit to either the Archbishop of York or even the Archbishop of Canterbury. Jocelin managed to obtain a Papal Bull which declared the see of Glasgow to be a "special daughter" of the Roman Patriarchate. Jocelin does not seem to have been interested in the other "Scottish" sees, merely to maintain his own episcopal independence. Moreover, Jocelin was able to get this Bull confirmed by Pope Alexander's successor Pope Lucius III.
Jocelin had obtained this confirmation while at Rome in late 1181 and early 1182. Jocelin had been sent there by King William, along with abbots of Melrose, Dunfermline and Kelso and the prior of Inchcolm, in order to appeal to the Pope regarding his stance in a struggle over the Bishopric of St Andrews and the sentence of excommunication and interdict the Pope had placed over the king and kingdom. The dispute concerned the election to the bishopric of John the Scot, which had been opposed by the king, who organized the election of his own candidate, Hugh. The mission was successful. The Pope lifted the interdict, absolved the king and appointed two legates to investigate the issue of the St Andrews succession. The Pope even sent the king a Golden Rose, an item usually given to the Prefect of Rome. The issue of the succession, however, did not go away. In 1186, Jocelin, along with the abbots of Melrose, Dunfermline and Newbattle, excommunicated Hugh on the instructions of Pope Lucius. Hugh travelled to Rome in 1188, and obtained absolution, but he died of the pestilence in that city a few days later, thus allowing the issue to be resolved.
It is certainly obvious that Jocelin was one of the most respected figures in the kingdom. In this era, the Pope appointed Jocelin Judge-delegate (of the Papacy) more times than any other cleric in the kingdom. As a bishop and an ex-abbot, various bishoprics and monasteries called him in to mediate disputes, as evidenced by his frequent appearance as a witness in dispute settlements, such as the dispute between Arbroath Abbey and the Bishopric of St Andrews, and a dispute between Jedburgh Abbey and Dryburgh Abbey. Jocelin had the respect of the secular elite too. He witnessed 24 royal charters, and 40 non-royal charters, including charters issued by David, Earl of Huntingdon (the brother of King William), Donnchadh, Earl of Carrick, and Alan Fitzwalter, High Steward of Scotland. Jocelin had been with King William when he visited the English court in 1186, and again accompanied the king to England when the king travelled to Woodstock near Oxford to marry Ermengarde de Beaumont on September 5th, 1186. The marriage was blessed by Bishop Jocelin in the their chamber, and it was to Jocelin's escort that King William entrusted her for the journey to Scotland. When a son was born to William and Ermengarde, the future King Alexander II, it was Jocelin who performed the baptism. In April 1194, Jocelin again travelled to England in the king's company, as William was visiting King Richard I. Jocelin's support of, and intimacy with, the king would be the key to earning his patronage, thus making possible the legacy that Jocelin would leave to Glasgow.
Glasgow legacy
Jocelin successfully promoted the interests of the settlement and church of Glasgow, perhaps more than any other bishop. Jocelin commissioned his namesake Jocelin of Furness, the same man who had written the Life of St. Waltheof, to write a Life of St. Kentigern, a task all the more necessary because, after 1159, the Papacy claimed the right to canonize saints. Kentigern, or Mungo as he is popularly known, was the saint traditionally associated with the see of Glasgow, and his status therefore reflected on Glasgow as a church and cult-centre. There had already been a cathedral at Glasgow before Jocelin's episcopate, and the idea that the ecclesiastical establishment before Jocelin was simply a small church with a larger Gaelic or British monastic establishment has been discredited by scholars. Jocelin did, though, expand the cathedral and eventually began the work of rebuilding it after its destruction in a fire. As the Chronicle of Melrose reports for 1181, Jocelin "gloriously enlarged the church of St Kentigern". However, this would come to nothing, as some time between the year 1189 and 1195, there was a fire at the cathedral, and Jocelin had to commission another rebuilding effort. The new cathedral was dedicated, according to the Chronicle of Melrose, on July 6, 1197. It was built in the Romanesque manner, and although little survives of it today, it is thought to have been influenced by the cathedral of Lund, the archbishop of which had consecrated Jocelin as bishop.
However, Jocelin left a still greater legacy to the city of Glasgow. At some point between the years 1175 and 1178, Jocelin obtained from King William a grant of burghal status for the settlement of Glasgow, with a market every Thursday. The grant of a market was the first ever official grant of a weekly market to a burgh. Moreover, between 1189 and 1195, King William granted the burgh an annual fair, a fair still in existence today, increasing Glasgow's status as an important settlement. As well as new revenues for the bishop, the rights entailed by Glasgow's new burghal status and market privileges brought new settlers to the settlement, one of the first of whom was one Ranulf de Haddington, a former burghess of Haddington. The new settlement was laid out (probably under the influence of the burgh of Haddington) around Glasgow Cross, down the hill from the cathedral and old fort of Glasgow, but above the flood level of the River Clyde.
Death
Jocelin may have retired to Melrose, where his career had begun, to die. Jocelin certainly did die at Melrose, on St Patrick's Day, i.e. March 17, 1199. He was buried in the monks' choir of Melrose Abbey Church. Hugh de Roxburgh, Chancellor of Scotland, was elected as Jocelin's replacement.