THE NORMAN CONQUEST.
One immediate result of the Norman conquest was that Archbishop Stigand
and several other bishops and abbots were ejected, and foreign
ecclesiastics put in their place. It is not necessary to suppose that
William acted solely on the desire to put men devoted to his interests
into these positions of power and influence, for Edward the Confessor had
already appointed some foreign bishops with the object of raising the tone
of learning and religion in the English Church; and all William’s nominees
were men of character, learning and practical ability. The removal of some
of the sees from unimportant villages to the principal town of the diocese
was a wise measure. It is said that some of the Norman bishops desired to
make the further improvement of replacing the monks, where they existed,
in their cathedrals, by canons, but were thwarted by Lanfranc.[73]
The parochial clergy seem to have been left undisturbed in their
benefices; only, as the benefices fell vacant in the usual course of
things, the new Norman lords of the manor, who had in so many cases
supplanted the old Saxon thanes, not unnaturally appointed relatives or
countrymen of their own to at least the more valuable of the parochial
benefices in their gift.
The Norman conquest of England opened up this country more fully to the
influence of the political and religious life of the Continent. The
patriarchal authority of the Roman see had long since been acknowledged by
the Saxon Church, but hitherto had very rarely intervened and as seldom
been appealed to; henceforward it was to become a much more important
factor both in the political and ecclesiastical life of this country. The
foreign bishops appointed by Edward the Confessor and William, and the
foreign parsons introduced by the new lords into their parishes, brought
with them the Hildebrandine theories of the relations of the Pope to the
Church and to the State. William sought to limit the exercise of the Papal
authority in his new kingdom by a decree that the Pope should send no
legates and no bulls without the consent of the Crown, and that his own
subjects should make no appeal to Rome without the Crown’s permission.
But, in fact, a considerable change gradually took place in the practical
relations of the English Church to the Roman see. The Saxon Church had
been isolated, the bishops and clergy had been eminently a national
clergy, with practically no one above them and no one between them and
their flocks. The appearance of two legates at the synod of Winchester
(1070), which deprived Stigand the archbishop, and, by consequence,
several bishops of his consecration, was the beginning of a series of very
important interventions of the Pope for good and for evil, which, together
with the multiplication of appeals to Rome, modified very much the
previous practically autonomous condition of the English Church. Another
important change was made by the separation of the civil and
ecclesiastical Courts determined upon by William “in the common council,
and by the advice of all the bishops and abbots, and all the princes of
his kingdom.” It abrogated the old Saxon custom set forth in the laws of
Canute (1016-1035),[74] that the bishop should sit with the sheriff in the
shire mote, and assist in the administration of justice and the
determination of causes; and enacted that, for the future, civil causes
should be determined by the secular judge; while, on the other hand, no
lay judge should interfere in the laws which belong to the bishop, or in
any causes which belong to the cure of souls. The results went further
than perhaps William had foreseen. One result was the setting up of
independent courts of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over all clerical
persons, down to the lowest of the men in minor orders, and in all
religious cases, including matrimonial and testamentary causes and
questions of oaths. This made the whole body of the clergy a privileged
class under a law and judges of their own, and this privilege the Church
maintained successfully against the endeavour of Henry II. to bring the
clergy under the jurisdiction of the King’s Courts, and continued down to
the “submission of the clergy” in the reign of Henry VIII. With this brief
general review of the constitutional changes effected at the time of the
Norman Conquest we proceed to our more humble task of noting the history
of the parochial clergy and of their flocks.
[Illustration: Durham Cathedral.]
The new men, military adventurers though they were, among whom the Norman
conqueror had divided the lands of England, did not, like the Anglo-Saxon
conquerors, trample out Christianity under their feet; nor, like the Danes
in their turn, plunder the monasteries and churches; on the contrary, the
Normans behaved like Christian men who, having come into power in a
country which was in a backward religious condition, set themselves to
effect religious improvements in their newly acquired possessions. Every
bishop set to work to rebuild his cathedral church, or to build a new one
in the place to which his see had been removed. This leads to the
inference that the old Saxon cathedrals were comparatively small, in an
inferior style of architecture, and perhaps out of repair. Many of the
lords of manors seem to have rebuilt the parish churches, and to have
built new churches in remote parts of their estates.[75] The bishops also
made provision for the spiritual wants of the people more especially
dependent upon them; Lanfranc, for example, built two churches and two
hospitals in Canterbury, and erected several churches in the manors
belonging to the archbishopric.
If we consider the way in which the landed property of the kingdom was
resettled after the Conquest, each great tenant of the Crown subdividing
his vast estates among the lesser lords who had fought under his banner,
we shall see the likelihood that each of these new lords of manors, as
soon as the country had settled down in tranquillity, would set himself to
make the best of his new acquisitions; to add to their value by breaking
up new waste land; to consult his dignity and comfort by improving upon
the rude old hall of his Saxon predecessor, or building himself a new
manor house. If his manor had only a chapel with imperfect privileges, he
would not be content without obtaining for it the status of an
independent parish; and the Norman taste for building would lead him to
replace the rude timber chapel by a stone church in the improved style of
architecture which had lately been introduced. In some cases the new lord
built himself a manor house on a new site at a distance from the old one,
and a church near to it, and adopted the new church as the parish church,
leaving the old one to serve as a chapel to those who lived near it.[76] A
great number of village churches in nearly all parts of England still
remain, in whole or in part, whose architectural characteristics show that
they are of about this period. Ordericus Vitalis, the historian of the
conqueror’s sons, says[77] that especially in the reign of Henry I.,[78]
by the fervent devotion of the faithful, the houses and temples built by
Edgar and Edward, and other Christian kings, were taken down to be
replaced with others of greater magnitude and more elegant workmanship, to
the glory of the Creator.
[Illustration: Old Shoreham Church, Sussex.]
The life of Orderic himself supplies an example. His father was a priest,
a man of some learning, who had come over at the Norman Conquest in the
train of Roger of Montgomery, afterwards created Earl of Shrewsbury, and
received from his lord lands on the Meole, three miles east of Shrewsbury.
He found on this estate of Atcham, a chapel built of timber dedicated to
S. Eata, and replaced it by one of stone. He had his son Orderic baptized
by the Saxon priest of the parish, who also stood as his sponsor, and gave
his own name (sometimes spelt Ulricus) to the child. At the age of five
years, he entrusted the child to the care of a priest named Siward, to be
taught the first rudiments of learning; and five years afterwards, on the
death of his noble patron, he devoted both himself and his son to the
monastic life in the monastery at Shrewsbury, which the earl had lately
founded.[79]
* * * * *
The greatest ecclesiastical work of the Normans was, however, the revival
of the monastic system, and the filling of the country with noble and
wealthy monasteries. The ascetic spirit had been revived in Italy and
France by Odo of Clugny, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, who
had founded new orders of the Benedictine and Augustinian rules. The
Norman nobles brought this new enthusiasm with them; and just as in the
early Saxon period every thane thought it incumbent upon him to build a
parish church on his estate, so now it became almost a fashion for every
great noble to found a monastery upon his lordship. The nobles, while
thinking first of the glory of God, and the spiritual advantages of the
prayers of a holy community for the founder, his family and descendants,
were conscious also of the dignity which a monastery reflected upon the
family which founded and patronized it, and not insensible to the temporal
advantages of the establishment of a centre of civilization and religion
in the midst of their dependents.
[Illustration: Norman bishops and abbots. (From the twelfth century MS.)]
William led the way by his foundation of a great Benedictine abbey on the
field of his victory at Hastings, to which was given the name of Battle
Abbey. William of Warrenne built a priory at Lewes (1077), into which he
introduced the new Cluniac Order. The canons regular of St. Augustine were
introduced into England at Colchester c. 1100; the Cistercians at Waverley
in Surrey, in 1128; the Carthusians at Witham in Somerset in 1180; and by
the end of the twelfth century religious houses of various orders had been
founded in every part of the country. We have seen that at the end of the
Saxon period there were only about fifty religious houses in England;
under William and his two successors upwards of 300 new ones were founded.
The religious fervour of the monks, who abandoned the world and practised
self-denial as a means to spiritual perfection and closer communion with
God, naturally excited awed admiration; the picturesque surroundings of
their profession, the frock and hood, the shaven head and mortified
countenance, the hard life of the cloister and the manifold services in
the church, impressed the imagination; and consequently the popularity of
the monks threw the secular clergy into the shade. The great churches of
the monasteries rivalled the cathedrals in magnitude and splendour; the
great abbots--relieved by the pope from the jurisdiction of their bishops,
exercising themselves jurisdiction over their own estates, summoned to
parliament, wealthy and learned--were the rivals of the bishops; and the
“lord monks” held a higher rank in public estimation than the parish
rectors. The importance of the political part they played in the life of
the Middle Ages was hardly, perhaps, commensurate with the space they
occupied in it. The Benedictines cultivated learning, and the Cistercians
were enterprising agriculturists; the Augustinian orders were useful as
preachers in the towns, and managers of hospitals; the nunneries of
various orders were schools for the daughters of the gentry; they were all
citadels of religion and learning over the length and breadth of the land;
but from the point of view of public utility, abbots and monks seldom took
any important part in the political events which made history, or were
employed in the administration of the government, or made their mark as
men of learning, as the bishops and secular clergy did in every
generation.
* * * * *
The principal relation between the monasteries and the parish priests is
a sinister one; when the popularity of the monks waned, and the secular
clergy in the thirteenth century regained the confidence of the people,
the mischief was already done which has never been undone. Nearly half the
parishes of England had been stripped of the best part of their
endowments, in order to found and enrich the monasteries; but a small
portion was rescued from their hands by the bishops on the reaction of the
thirteenth century; the rest the monks retained till the Reformation of
the sixteenth century; and then it was swallowed up by the king and his
new nobility. But the history of the impropriation of benefices, and the
subsequent foundation of perpetual vicarages, requires a chapter to
itself.
[Illustration: ORDINATION OF A PRIEST. FROM THE LATE XII. CENT. DRAWING,
HARL. ROLL, Y 6.]