Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Hermann (d.1078)
HERMANN (d. 1078), first bishop of Salisbury, a native of Lorraine, was probably one of the clerks of the royal chapel under the Danish dynasty, and held that office when, in 1045, Edward the Confessor [q. v.] appointed him bishop of Ramsbury or Wilton, in succession to Brihtwold. He was sent to Rome in 1050, in company with Aldred [q. v.], bishop of Worcester. His business was probably to obtain a dispensation from Edward's vow of pilgrimage. He started at mid-Lent, and arrived in Rome on Easter eve, during the session of the council of that year. As Ramsbury had no congregation of monks or canons and very small revenues, the bishop was discontented. His predecessors, he told the king, were Englishmen, and had kinsmen to help them, but he, as a foreigner, could not get a livelihood. Edith [q. v.], the king's wife, promised that when a see fell vacant she would do what she could to get it for him, to hold along with the one he already had. However, in 1055 Brihtwold, the abbot of Malmesbury, died, and Hermann asked the king for the abbey and for permission to remove his see thither. The king assented, but the monks, who naturally objected to the arrangement, sought the aid of Earl Harold (d. 1066) [q. v.], and he persuaded Edward to retract his consent three days after he had granted it. Indignant at his defeat, Hermann left England, and became a monk of St. Bertin's Abbey at St. Omer, the administration of his diocese being undertaken by Aldred. It was not long before he repented of this step; he had been used to live comfortably, and the privations of monastic life did not suit him. In 1058 the see of Sherborne fell vacant; he returned and received the bishopric, Harold making no objection; thus the two sees of Sherborne and Ramsbury were united, and he was bishop over Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Dorsetshire. In 1065 he dedicated the new church which Edith built at Wilton. Hermann did not lose his bishopric in consequence of the Norman conquest, and on 29 Aug. 1070 assisted at the consecration of Lanfranc. He was present at the council held at Winchester in April 1072, and at the Whitsuntide assembly at Windsor, when the dispute between the provinces of Canterbury and York was judged. It having been ordered in a council held in London in 1075, at which he was present, that episcopal sees should be removed from villages or small towns to cities, he removed the see of his united diocese to the older Salisbury or Old Sarum, and began to build his church within the ancient hillfortress. He died, before he could finish it, on 20 April 1078. A tomb of Purbeck marble near the western entrance of the cathedral of the present Salisbury is said to have been his, and to have been brought from Old Sarum when the see was moved by Bishop Richard Poore; but this is unlikely, for while the translation of the bodies of other bishops in 1226 is recorded by William de Wenda, he does not mention the body of Hermann. William of Malmesbury, as is natural, considering the bishop's relations with his monastery, describes him as greedy. He was evidently well thought of at the Confessor's court, and the king's biographer speaks of him as famous and learned.