Nigel (Bishop of Ely) - Under Henry I

Under Henry I

Nigel first became Treasurer in the reign of Henry I, and seems to have held that office from around 1126. He was already a receiver, or auditor and administrator, in the treasury of Normandy, and he served as treasurer for both realms, moving with the king and court between England and Normandy. The date of his appointment is unclear, as until he became a bishop, royal charters listed him as "nephew of the bishop" (Roger of Salisbury), rather than by any office he held. In 1131, though, he was listed in a papal letter as "Nigel, the treasurer", which securely establishes that he held the office at that date.

In 1133, Roger of Salisbury secured the bishopric of Ely for Nigel. Ely had been without a bishop since 1131; after the two-year vacancy, King Henry made the appointment because he was settling outstanding business before leaving England to return to Normandy. At this time Henry also appointed Geoffrey Rufus to Durham, and Æthelwold to the newly created Diocese of Carlisle. Nigel was consecrated on 1 October 1133 at Lambeth by William de Corbeil—who was by then Archbishop of Canterbury—possibly with the assistance of Roger of Salisbury. Nigel continued to hold the office of treasurer until 1136, when he was replaced by a relative, Adelelm, although the historian C. Warren Hollister placed his departure from the office in 1133 with his appointment to Ely. The Constitutio domus regis, or Establishment of the King's Household, may have been written by Nigel, or possibly for his use, and probably was composed around 1135.

Ely had until 1109 been an independent monastery, but its last abbot, Richard, had proposed to the king a plan by which the abbey would become a bishopric, presumably with the abbot himself as bishop. Richard died before the proposal could be put into operation, but in 1109, the custodian of the vacant abbey secured permission to make the change, and became the first Bishop of Ely. However, the administrative changes needed to make the abbey into a bishopric took longer, and were still unresolved at the time of Nigel's appointment. Regardless, Nigel was constantly at court, as shown by his appearance 31 times as a witness to charters during the last 10 years of Henry I's reign. This left little time for administration of his diocese, and Nigel appointed a married clergyman, Ranulf of Salisbury, to administer the diocese. Ranulf seems to have tyrannized the monks of the cathedral chapter, and Nigel appears to have done little to protect his monks from abuse. Later, during the early years of Stephen's reign, Nigel claimed to have uncovered a plot led by Ranulf to assassinate Normans. The exact nature of the conspiracy is obscure, and it is unclear what prompted it. The medieval chronicler Orderic Vitalis claimed that Ranulf planned to kill all the Normans in the government and hand the country over to the Scots. After the discovery of the plot, Ranulf fled the country and Nigel made peace with the monks of his cathedral chapter. Another source of conflict with his monks was the desire of the cathedral chapter to enjoy the same "liberty" as a corporate body that the bishops did in the diocese. This liberty was a group of rights that the abbey had originally held, and had transferred to the bishop when the abbey became a bishopric. The rights included sake and soke, or the right to command dues from the land, and the right to levy tolls. They also included the right to hold courts dealing with theft. Around 1135, Nigel conceded this point to the monks. Although he restored some of the lands that had been taken from the monks by Ranulf, the Liber Eliensis (the house chronicle of the monks of Ely) continued to decry his administration of the diocese and the lands of the cathedral chapter, alleging that "he kept back for himself some properties of the church which he wanted, and very good ones they were". The chronicle contains a number of complaints that Nigel oppressed the monks or despoiled them.