Letter CCLXXIX. To Count Henry
(A.D. 1152.)
He entreats the Count to enforce restitution for an injury.
The Abbot of Chatillon,1 a man of piety, when setting out for Rome, committed all his goods to the custody of me under God. And lo! the servants of Simon de Belfort have stolen his pigs. I would rather that they had taken mine. I require them at your hands. The Prince of the Kings of the earth has made you a prince on the earth, in order that under Him, and for Him, you may cherish the good, restrain the evil, defend the poor, help them to right that suffer wrong. If you do these things you do the work of a prince, and my hope is that God will extend and establish your power. If you do them not, it is to be feared that He will take from you the honour and power which you seem to have.
Footnotes
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Baldwin, to whom Letter 401 was written, was afterwards Bishop of Noyon (ep. 402). The Abbey of Chatillon here alluded to was without doubt the house of regular Augustinian canons on the Seine, in the Diocese of Langres, where Bernard received his earliest education, and which he turned from a secular into a regular Order: it was not the Neustrian Chatillon, as some wrongly think. Chatillon, of which this Baldwin was Abbot, was not far from Clairvaux, so close indeed that the Abbot, when about to set out for Rome, entrusted his goods to Bernard's care. Moreover, Belfort, which from the context of this Letter was not far from Chatillon, was situated on the river Voire, which flows into the Aube below Clairvaux, and the town of Bar-sur-Aube. In the ancient records of Chatillon of Langres Baldwin, moreover, is reckoned as second Abbot, after Aldon, the first. ↩
Chapter 279 of 491