[12] Nigel attended the consecration of Bernard as Bishop of St David's at Westminster in 1115, and may have returned to England from Laon by 1112.

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.

[26] Nigel was consecrated on 1 October 1133[20] at Lambeth by William de Corbeil – who was by then Archbishop of Canterbury[1] – possibly with the assistance of Roger of Salisbury.

[22][c] The Constitutio domus regis, or Establishment of the King's Household, may have been written by Nigel, or possibly for his use,[1][30] and probably was composed around 1135.

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.

[31] Regardless, Nigel was constantly at court, as shown by his appearance 31 times as a witness to charters during the last ten years of Henry I's reign.

[32] Later, during the early years of Stephen's reign, Nigel claimed to have uncovered a plot led by Ranulf to assassinate Normans.

[33] 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.

[1] 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.

[37][d] After Stephen's accession, Nigel was at first retained as treasurer, but the king came to suspect him and his family of secretly supporting Matilda.

[39] The prime movers behind Stephen's suspicions against the bishops were the Beaumont family, headed by the twin brothers Robert, Earl of Leicester, and Waleran, Count of Meulan,[40][41] who wished to be the main advisors of the king.

[42][43] Roger, Alexander, and Nigel together held key castles, including Salisbury, Devizes, Sherborne, Malmesbury, Sleaford, and Newark.

[41] The contemporary chronicler Orderic Vitalis felt that Roger's family were going to betray the king, but William of Malmesbury believed that the allegations were based on envy from "powerful laymen".

[48][49] At a court held at Oxford in June 1139, Stephen required Roger of Salisbury, Alexander of Lincoln, and Nigel to surrender their castles as a consequence of the brawl.

[54] Part of the problem confronting the assembled bishops was that Stephen had not expelled Roger's family from their ecclesiastical offices, merely their secular ones.

Recent historians have held a lively debate on the issue; a few still hold to the traditional interpretation,[56][57] but most have decided that reactions in the English church were more ambivalent.

Nigel took refuge at the court of Stephen's rival, the Empress Matilda,[61] who had landed in England in the south on 30 September 1139 in a bid to take the throne.

[40] The revolt stood little chance of succeeding, for there were no supporters of Matilda close to East Anglia, and it is likely that Nigel reacted more out of fear and anger at his uncle's death than anything else.

[63] Ultimately, this agreement came to nothing when Matilda's chief supporter, her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, was captured and later exchanged for Stephen.

[66] While he was there, Pope Lucius II issued a number of rulings in Nigel's favour, ordering his restitution to Ely.

[70] By 1147, Nigel was again witnessing Stephen's charters, and in 1153 or 1154 he was named in a grant of lands to St Radegund's Priory in Cambridge.

[71] He took part in shire courts in both Norfolk and Suffolk in 1150,[23] and continued to assist with episcopal consecrations throughout the remainder of Stephen's reign.

[1] After the accession of Henry II, Nigel was summoned to reorganize the Exchequer,[74] or treasury, that was responsible for the production of the government's financial records, including the Pipe Rolls.

[76] Nigel was the only surviving minister of Henry I, and his knowledge of the Exchequer was needed to help reorganize the revenues of the king and restore administrative practices lost during Stephen's reign.

The restitution was hampered by the absence of the king from England, and the dispute dragged on until finally it was resolved by Nigel pledging in front of Theobald of Bec, Archbishop of Canterbury, to restore the lands.

[86] Even this did not end the quarrels with the monks, as Nigel then named a married clerk as sacrist of Ely, an action which was condemned by Thomas Becket, the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

A gold and bejewelled textile covering ... was sold to the Bishop of Lincoln, Alexander, who took it with him to Rome as a gift of particular splendour.

"[99] Whatever Nigel's administrative talent, his ecclesiastical abilities are generally held to be low; the Gesta Stephani says both he and Alexander were "men who loved display and were rash in their reckless presumption ... disregarding the holy and simple manner of life that befits a Christian priest they devoted themselves so utterly to warfare and the vanities of this world that whenever they attended court by appointment they ... aroused general astonishment on account of the extraordinary concourse of knights by which they were surrounded on every side.