 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.
