THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND.
1070–1086.
ENGLAND was now fully conquered, and William could for a moment sit down
quietly to the rule of the kingdom that he had won. The time that
immediately followed is spoken of as a time of comparative quiet, and of
less oppression than the times either before or after. Before and after,
warfare, on one side of the sea or the other, was the main business.
Hitherto William has been winning his kingdom in arms. Afterwards he was
more constantly called away to his foreign dominions, and his absence
always led to greater oppression in England. Just now he had a moment of
repose, when he could give his mind to the affairs of Church and State in
England. Peace indeed was not quite unbroken. Events were tending to
that famous revolt in the Fenland which is perhaps the best remembered
part of William’s reign. But even this movement was merely local, and
did not seriously interfere with William’s government. He was now
striving to settle the land in peace, and to make his rule as little
grievous to the conquered as might be. The harrying of Northumberland
showed that he now shrank from no harshness that would serve his ends;
but from mere purposeless oppression he was still free. Nor was he ever
inclined to needless change or to that scorn of the conquered which
meaner conquerors have often shown. He clearly wished both to change and
to oppress as little as he could. This is a side of him which has been
greatly misunderstood, largely through the book that passes for the
History of Ingulf Abbot of Crowland. Ingulf was William’s English
secretary; a real history of his writing would be most precious. But the
book that goes by his name is a forgery not older than the fourteenth
century, and is in all points contradicted by the genuine documents of
the time. Thus the forger makes William try to abolish the English
language and order the use of French in legal writings. This is pure
fiction. The truth is that, from the time of William’s coming, English
goes out of use in legal writings, but only gradually, and not in favour
of French. Ever since the coming of Augustine, English and Latin had
been alternative tongues; after the coming of William English becomes
less usual, and in the course of the twelfth century it goes out of use
in favour of Latin. There are no French documents till the thirteenth
century, and in that century English begins again. Instead of abolishing
the English tongue, William took care that his English-born son should
learn it, and he even began to learn it himself. A king of those days
held it for his duty to hear and redress his subjects’ complaints; he had
to go through the land and see for himself that those who acted in his
name did right among his people. This earlier kings had done; this
William wished to do; but he found his ignorance of English a hindrance.
Cares of other kinds checked his English studies, but he may have learned
enough to understand the meaning of his own English charters. Nor did
William try, as he is often imagined to have done, to root out the
ancient institutions of England, and to set up in their stead either the
existing institutions of Normandy or some new institutions of his own
devising. The truth is that with William began a gradual change in the
laws and customs of England, undoubtedly great, but far less than is
commonly thought. French names have often supplanted English, and have
made the amount of change seem greater than it really was. Still much
change did follow on the Norman Conquest, and the Norman Conquest was so
completely William’s own act that all that came of it was in some sort
his act also. But these changes were mainly the gradual results of the
state of things which followed William’s coming; they were but very
slightly the results of any formal acts of his. With a foreign king and
foreigners in all high places, much practical change could not fail to
follow, even where the letter of the law was unchanged. Still the
practical change was less than if the letter of the law had been changed
as well. English law was administered by foreign judges; the foreign
grantees of William held English land according to English law. The
Norman had no special position as a Norman; in every rank except perhaps
the very highest and the very lowest, he had Englishmen to his fellows.
All this helped to give the Norman Conquest of England its peculiar
character, to give it an air of having swept away everything English,
while its real work was to turn strangers into Englishmen. And that
character was impressed on William’s work by William himself. The king
claiming by legal right, but driven to assert his right by the sword, was
unlike both the foreign king who comes in by peaceful succession and the
foreign king who comes in without even the pretext of law. The Normans
too, if born soldiers, were also born lawyers, and no man was more deeply
impressed with the legal spirit than William himself. He loved neither
to change the law nor to transgress the law, and he had little need to do
either. He knew how to make the law his instrument, and, without either
changing or transgressing it, to use it to make himself all-powerful. He
thoroughly enjoyed that system of legal fictions and official euphemisms
which marks his reign. William himself became in some sort an
Englishman, and those to whom he granted English lands had in some sort
to become Englishmen in order to hold them. The Norman stepped into the
exact place of the Englishman whose land he held; he took his rights and
his burthens, and disputes about those rights and burthens were judged
according to English law by the witness of Englishmen. Reigning over two
races in one land, William would be lord of both alike, able to use
either against the other in case of need. He would make the most of
everything in the feelings and customs of either that tended to
strengthen his own hands. And, in the state of things in which men then
found themselves, whatever strengthened William’s hands strengthened law
and order in his kingdom.
There was therefore nothing to lead William to make any large changes in
the letter of the English law. The powers of a King of the English,
wielded as he knew how to wield them, made him as great as he could wish
to be. Once granting the original wrong of his coming at all and
bringing a host of strangers with him, there is singularly little to
blame in the acts of the Conqueror. Of bloodshed, of wanton interference
with law and usage, there is wonderfully little. Englishmen and Normans
were held to have settled down in peace under the equal protection of
King William. The two races were drawing together; the process was
beginning which, a hundred years later, made it impossible, in any rank
but the highest and the lowest, to distinguish Norman from Englishman.
Among the smaller landowners and the townsfolk this intermingling had
already begun, while earls and bishops were not yet so exclusively
Norman, nor had the free churls of England as yet sunk so low as at a
later stage. Still some legislation was needed to settle the relations
of the two races. King William proclaimed the “renewal of the law of
King Edward.” This phrase has often been misunderstood; it is a common
form when peace and good order are restored after a period of
disturbance. The last reign which is looked back to as to a time of good
government becomes the standard of good government, and it is agreed
between king and people, between contending races or parties, that things
shall be as they were in the days of the model ruler. So we hear in
Normandy of the renewal of the law of Rolf, and in England of the renewal
of the law of Cnut. So at an earlier time Danes and Englishmen agreed in
the renewal of the law of Edgar. So now Normans and Englishmen agreed in
the renewal of the law of Edward. There was no code either of Edward’s
or of William’s making. William simply bound himself to rule as Edward
had ruled. But in restoring the law of King Edward, he added, “with the
additions which I have decreed for the advantage of the people of the
English.”
These few words are indeed weighty. The little legislation of William’s
reign takes throughout the shape of additions. Nothing old is repealed;
a few new enactments are set up by the side of the old ones. And these
words describe, not only William’s actual legislation, but the widest
general effect of his coming. The Norman Conquest did little towards any
direct abolition of the older English laws or institutions. But it set
up some new institutions alongside of old ones; and it brought in not a
few names, habits, and ways of looking at things, which gradually did
their work. In England no man has pulled down; many have added and
modified. Our law is still the law of King Edward with the additions of
King William. Some old institutions took new names; some new
institutions with new names sprang up by the side of old ones. Sometimes
the old has lasted, sometimes the new. We still have a _king_ and not a
_roy_; but he gathers round him a _parliament_ and not a _vitenagemót_.
We have a _sheriff_ and not a _viscount_; but his district is more
commonly called a _county_ than a _shire_. But _county_ and _shire_ are
French and English for the same thing, and “parliament” is simply French
for the “deep speech” which King William had with his Witan. The
National Assembly of England has changed its name and its constitution
more than once; but it has never been changed by any sudden revolution,
never till later times by any formal enactment. There was no moment when
one kind of assembly supplanted another. And this has come because our
Conqueror was, both by his disposition and his circumstances, led to act
as a preserver and not as a destroyer.
The greatest recorded acts of William, administrative and legislative,
come in the last days of his reign. But there are several enactments of
William belonging to various periods of his reign, and some of them to
this first moment of peace. Here we distinctly see William as an English
statesman, as a statesman who knew how to work a radical change under
conservative forms. One enactment, perhaps the earliest of all, provided
for the safety of the strangers who had come with him to subdue and to
settle in the land. The murder of a Norman by an Englishman, especially
of a Norman intruder by a dispossessed Englishman, was a thing that
doubtless often happened. William therefore provides for the safety of
those whom he calls “the men whom I brought with me or who have come
after me;” that is, the warriors of Senlac, Exeter, and York. These men
are put within his own peace; wrong done to them is wrong done to the
King, his crown and dignity. If the murderer cannot be found, the lord
and, failing him, the hundred, must make payment to the King. Of this
grew the presentment of _Englishry_, one of the few formal badges of
distinction between the conquering and the conquered race. Its practical
need could not have lasted beyond a generation or two, but it went on as
a form ages after it had lost all meaning. An unknown corpse, unless it
could be proved that the dead man was English, was assumed to be that of
a man who had come with King William, and the fine was levied. Some
other enactments were needed when two nations lived side by side in the
same land. As in earlier times, Roman and barbarian each kept his own
law, so now for some purposes the Frenchman—“Francigena”—and the
Englishman kept their own law. This is chiefly with regard to the modes
of appealing to God’s judgement in doubtful cases. The English did this
by ordeal, the Normans by wager of battle. When a man of one nation
appealed a man of the other, the accused chose the mode of trial. If an
Englishman appealed a Frenchman and declined to prove his charge either
way, the Frenchman might clear himself by oath. But these privileges
were strictly confined to Frenchmen who had come with William and after
him. Frenchmen who had in Edward’s time settled in England as the land
of their own choice, reckoned as Englishmen. Other enactments, fresh
enactments of older laws, touched both races. The slave trade was rife
in its worst form; men were sold out of the land, chiefly to the Danes of
Ireland. Earlier kings had denounced the crime, and earlier bishops had
preached against it. William denounced it again under the penalty of
forfeiture of all lands and goods, and Saint Wulfstan, the Bishop of
Worcester, persuaded the chief offenders, Englishmen of Bristol, to give
up their darling sin for a season. Yet in the next reign Anselm and his
synod had once more to denounce the crime under spiritual penalties, when
they had no longer the strong arm of William to enforce them.
Another law bears more than all the personal impress of William. In it
he at once, on one side, forestalls the most humane theories of modern
times, and on the other sins most directly against them. His remarkable
unwillingness to put any man to death, except among the chances of the
battle-field, was to some extent the feeling of his age. With him the
feeling takes the shape of a formal law. He forbids the infliction of
death for any crime whatever. But those who may on this score be
disposed to claim the Conqueror as a sympathizer will be shocked at the
next enactment. Those crimes which kings less merciful than William
would have punished with death are to be punished with loss of eyes or
other foul and cruel mutilations. Punishments of this kind now seem more
revolting than death, though possibly, now as then, the sufferer himself
might think otherwise. But in those days to substitute mutilation for
death, in the case of crimes which were held to deserve death, was
universally deemed an act of mercy. Grave men shrank from sending their
fellow-creatures out of the world, perhaps without time for repentance;
but physical sympathy with physical suffering had little place in their
minds. In the next century a feeling against bodily mutilation gradually
comes in; but as yet the mildest and most thoughtful men, Anselm himself,
make no protest against it when it is believed to be really deserved.
There is no sign of any general complaint on this score. The English
Chronicler applauds the strict police of which mutilation formed a part,
and in one case he deliberately holds it to be the fitting punishment of
the offence. In fact, when penal settlements were unknown and legal
prisons were few and loathsome, there was something to be said for a
punishment which disabled the criminal from repeating his offence. In
William’s jurisprudence mutilation became the ordinary sentence of the
murderer, the robber, the ravisher, sometimes also of English revolters
against William’s power. We must in short balance his mercy against the
mercy of Kirk and Jeffreys.
The ground on which the English Chronicler does raise his wail on behalf
of his countrymen is the special jurisprudence of the forests and the
extortions of money with which he charges the Conqueror. In both these
points the royal hand became far heavier under the Norman rule. In both
William’s character grew darker as he grew older. He is charged with
unlawful exactions of money, in his character alike of sovereign and of
landlord. We read of his sharp practice in dealing with the profits of
the royal demesnes. He would turn out the tenant to whom he had just let
the land, if another offered a higher rent. But with regard to taxation,
we must remember that William’s exactions, however heavy at the time,
were a step in the direction of regular government. In those days all
taxation was disliked. Direct taking of the subject’s money by the King
was deemed an extraordinary resource to be justified only by some
extraordinary emergency, to buy off the Danes or to hire soldiers against
them. Men long after still dreamed that the King could “live of his
own,” that he could pay all expenses of his court and government out of
the rents and services due to him as a landowner, without asking his
people for anything in the character of sovereign. Demands of money on
behalf of the King now became both heavier and more frequent. And
another change which had long been gradually working now came to a head.
When, centuries later, the King was bidden to “live of his own,” men had
forgotten that the land of the King had once been the land of the nation.
In all Teutonic communities, great and small, just as in the city
communities of Greece and Italy, the community itself was a chief
landowner. The nation had its _folkland_, its _ager publicus_, the
property of no one man but of the whole state. Out of this, by the
common consent, portions might be cut off and _booked_—granted by a
written document—to particular men as their own _bookland_. The King
might have his private estate, to be dealt with at his own pleasure, but
of the _folkland_, the land of the nation, he was only the chief
administrator, bound to act by the advice of his Witan. But in this case
more than in others, the advice of the Witan could not fail to become
formal; the _folkland_, ever growing through confiscations, ever
lessening through grants, gradually came to be looked on as the land of
the King, to be dealt with as he thought good. We must not look for any
change formally enacted; but in Edward’s day the notion of _folkland_, as
the possession of the nation and not of the King, could have been only a
survival, and in William’s day even the survival passed away. The land
which was practically the land of King Edward became, as a matter of
course, _Terra Regis_, the land of King William. That land was now
enlarged by greater confiscations and lessened by greater grants than
ever. For a moment, every lay estate had been part of the land of
William. And far more than had been the land of the nation remained the
land of the King, to be dealt with as he thought good.
In the tenure of land William seems to have made no formal change. But
the circumstances of his reign gave increased strength to certain
tendencies which had been long afloat. And out of them, in the next
reign, the malignant genius of Randolf Flambard devised a systematic code
of oppression. Yet even in his work there is little of formal change.
There are no laws of William Rufus. The so called feudal incidents, the
claims of marriage, wardship, and the like, on the part of the lord, the
ancient _heriot_ developed into the later _relief_, all these things were
in the germ under William, as they had been in the germ long before him.
In the hands of Randolf Flambard they stiffen into established custom;
their legal acknowledgement comes from the charter of Henry the First
which promises to reform their abuses. Thus the Conqueror clearly
claimed the right to interfere with the marriages of his nobles, at any
rate to forbid a marriage to which he objected on grounds of policy.
Under Randolf Flambard this became a regular claim, which of course was
made a means of extorting money. Under Henry the claim is regulated and
modified, but by being regulated and modified, it is legally established.
The ordinary administration of the kingdom went on under William, greatly
modified by the circumstances of his reign, but hardly at all changed in
outward form. Like the kings that were before him, he “wore his crown”
at the three great feasts, at Easter at Winchester, at Pentecost at
Westminster, at Christmas at Gloucester. Like the kings that were before
him, he gathered together the great men of the realm, and when need was,
the small men also. Nothing seems to have been changed in the
constitution or the powers of the assembly; but its spirit must have been
utterly changed. The innermost circle, earls, bishops, great officers of
state and household, gradually changed from a body of Englishmen with a
few strangers among them into a body of strangers among whom two or three
Englishmen still kept their places. The result of their “deep speech”
with William was not likely to be other than an assent to William’s will.
The ordinary freeman did not lose his abstract right to come and shout
“Yea, yea,” to any addition that King William made to the law of King
Edward. But there would be nothing to tempt him to come, unless King
William thought fit to bid him. But once at least William did gather
together, if not every freeman, at least all freeholders of the smallest
account. On one point the Conqueror had fully made up his mind; on one
point he was to be a benefactor to his kingdom through all succeeding
ages. The realm of England was to be one and indivisible. No ruler or
subject in the kingdom of England should again dream that that kingdom
could be split asunder. When he offered Harold the underkingship of the
realm or of some part of it, he did so doubtless only in the full
conviction that the offer would be refused. No such offer should be
heard of again. There should be no such division as had been between
Cnut and Edmund, between Harthacnut and the first Harold, such as Edwin
and Morkere had dreamed of in later times. Nor should the kingdom be
split asunder in that subtler way which William of all men best
understood, the way in which the Frankish kingdoms, East and West, had
split asunder. He would have no dukes or earls who might become kings in
all but name, each in his own duchy or earldom. No man in his realm
should be to him as he was to his overlord at Paris. No man in his realm
should plead duty towards an immediate lord as an excuse for breach of
duty towards the lord of that immediate lord. Hence William’s policy
with regard to earldoms. There was to be nothing like the great
governments which had been held by Godwine, Leofric, and Siward; an Earl
of the West-Saxons or the Northumbrians was too like a Duke of the
Normans to be endured by one who was Duke of the Normans himself. The
earl, even of the king’s appointment, still represented the separate
being of the district over which he was set. He was the king’s
representative rather than merely his officer; if he was a magistrate and
not a prince, he often sat in the seat of former princes, and might
easily grow into a prince. And at last, at the very end of his reign, as
the finishing of his work, he took the final step that made England for
ever one. In 1086 every landowner in England swore to be faithful to
King William within and without England and to defend him against his
enemies. The subject’s duty to the King was to any duty which the vassal
might owe to any inferior lord. When the King was the embodiment of
national unity and orderly government, this was the greatest of all steps
in the direction of both. Never did William or any other man act more
distinctly as an English statesman, never did any one act tell more
directly towards the later making of England, than this memorable act of
the Conqueror. Here indeed is an addition which William made to the law
of Edward for the truest good of the English folk. And yet no enactment
has ever been more thoroughly misunderstood. Lawyer after lawyer has set
down in his book that, at the assembly of Salisbury in 1086, William
introduced “the feudal system.” If the words “feudal system” have any
meaning, the object of the law now made was to hinder any “feudal system”
from coming into England. William would be king of a kingdom, head of a
commonwealth, personal lord of every man in his realm, not merely, like a
King of the French, external lord of princes whose subjects owed him no
allegiance. This greatest monument of the Conqueror’s statesmanship was
carried into effect in a special assembly of the English nation gathered
on the first day of August 1086 on the great plain of Salisbury. Now,
perhaps for the first time, we get a distinct foreshadowing of Lords and
Commons. The Witan, the great men of the realm, and “the landsitting
men,” the whole body of landowners, are now distinguished. The point is
that William required the personal presence of every man whose personal
allegiance he thought worth having. Every man in the mixed assembly,
mixed indeed in race and speech, the King’s own men and the men of other
lords, took the oath and became the man of King William. On that day
England became for ever a kingdom one and indivisible, which since that
day no man has dreamed of parting asunder.
* * * * *
The great assembly of 1086 will come again among the events of William’s
later reign; it comes here as the last act of that general settlement
which began in 1070. That settlement, besides its secular side, has also
an ecclesiastical side of a somewhat different character. In both
William’s coming brought the island kingdom into a closer connexion with
the continent; and brought a large displacement of Englishmen and a large
promotion of strangers. But on the ecclesiastical side, though the
changes were less violent, there was a more marked beginning of a new
state of things. The religious missionary was more inclined to innovate
than the military conqueror. Here William not only added but changed; on
one point he even proclaimed that the existing law of England was bad.
Certainly the religious state of England was likely to displease
churchmen from the mainland. The English Church, so directly the child
of the Roman, was, for that very reason, less dependent on her parent.
She was a free colony, not a conquered province. The English Church too
was most distinctly national; no land came so near to that ideal state of
things in which the Church is the nation on its religious side. Papal
authority therefore was weaker in England than elsewhere, and a less
careful line was drawn between spiritual and temporal things and
jurisdictions. Two friendly powers could take liberties with each other.
The national assemblies dealt with ecclesiastical as well as with
temporal matters; one indeed among our ancient laws blames any assembly
that did otherwise. Bishop and earl sat together in the local _Gemót_,
to deal with many matters which, according to continental ideas, should
have been dealt with in separate courts. And, by what in continental
eyes seemed a strange laxity of discipline, priests, bishops, members of
capitular bodies, were often married. The English diocesan arrangements
were unlike continental models. In Gaul, by a tradition of Roman date,
the bishop was bishop of the city. His diocese was marked by the extent
of the civil jurisdiction of the city. His home, his head church, his
_bishopstool_ in the head church, were all in the city. In Teutonic
England the bishop was commonly bishop, not of a city but of a tribe or
district; his style was that of a tribe; his home, his head church, his
bishopstool, might be anywhere within the territory of that tribe.
Still, on the greatest point of all, matters in England were thoroughly
to William’s liking; nowhere did the King stand forth more distinctly as
the Supreme Governor of the Church. In England, as in Normandy, the
right of the sovereign to the investiture of ecclesiastical benefices was
ancient and undisputed. What Edward had freely done, William went on
freely doing, and Hildebrand himself never ventured on a word of
remonstrance against a power which he deemed so wrongful in the hands of
his own sovereign. William had but to stand on the rights of his
predecessors. When Gregory asked for homage for the crown which he had
in some sort given, William answered indeed as an English king. What the
kings before him had done for or paid to the Roman see, that would he do
and pay; but this no king before him had ever done, nor would he be the
first to do it. But while William thus maintained the rights of his
crown, he was willing and eager to do all that seemed needful for
ecclesiastical reform. And the general result of his reform was to
weaken the insular independence of England, to make her Church more like
the other Churches of the West, and to increase the power of the Roman
Bishop.
William had now a fellow-worker in his taste. The subtle spirit which
had helped to win his kingdom was now at his side to help him to rule it.
Within a few months after the taking of Chester Lanfranc sat on the
throne of Augustine. As soon as the actual Conquest was over, William
began to give his mind to ecclesiastical matters. It might look like
sacrilege when he caused all the monasteries of England to be harried.
But no harm was done to the monks or to their possessions. The holy
houses were searched for the hoards which the rich men of England,
fearing the new king, had laid up in the monastic treasuries. William
looked on these hoards as part of the forfeited goods of rebels, and
carried them off during the Lent of 1070. This done, he sat steadily
down to the reform of the English Church.
He had three papal legates to guide him, one of whom, Ermenfrid, Bishop
of Sitten, had come in on a like errand in the time of Edward. It was a
kind of solemn confirmation of the Conquest, when, at the assembly held
at Winchester in 1070, the King’s crown was placed on his head by
Ermenfrid. The work of deposing English prelates and appointing foreign
successors now began. The primacy of York was regularly vacant; Ealdred
had died as the Danes sailed up the Humber to assault or to deliver his
city. The primacy of Canterbury was to be made vacant by the deposition
of Stigand. His canonical position had always been doubtful; neither
Harold nor William had been crowned by him; yet William had treated him
hitherto with marked courtesy, and he had consecrated at least one Norman
bishop, Remigius of Dorchester. He was now deprived both of the
archbishopric and of the bishopric of Winchester which he held with it,
and was kept under restraint for the rest of his life. According to
foreign canonical rules the sentence may pass as just; but it marked a
stage in the conquest of England when a stout-hearted Englishman was
removed from the highest place in the English Church to make way for the
innermost counsellor of the Conqueror. In the Pentecostal assembly, held
at Windsor, Lanfranc was appointed archbishop; his excuses were overcome
by his old master Herlwin of Bec; he came to England, and on August 15,
1070 he was consecrated to the primacy.
Other deprivations and appointments took place in these assemblies. The
see of York was given to Thomas, a canon of Bayeux, a man of high
character and memorable in the local history of his see. The abbey of
Peterborough was vacant by the death of Brand, who had received the staff
from the uncrowned Eadgar. It was only by rich gifts that he had turned
away the wrath of William from his house. The Fenland was perhaps
already stirring, and the Abbot of Peterborough might have to act as a
military commander. In this case the prelate appointed, a Norman named
Turold, was accordingly more of a soldier than of a monk. From these
assemblies of 1070 the series of William’s ecclesiastical changes goes
on. As the English bishops die or are deprived, strangers take their
place. They are commonly Normans, but Walcher, who became Bishop of
Durham in 1071, was one of those natives of Lorraine who had been largely
favoured in Edward’s day. At the time of William’s death Wulfstan was
the only Englishman who kept a bishopric. Even his deprivation had once
been thought of. The story takes a legendary shape, but it throws an
important light on the relations of Church and State in England. In an
assembly held in the West Minster Wulfstan is called on by William and
Lanfranc to give up his staff. He refuses; he will give it back to him
who gave it, and places it on the tomb of his dead master Edward. No of
his enemies can move it. The sentence is recalled, and the staff yields
to his touch. Edward was not yet a canonized saint; the appeal is simply
from the living and foreign king to the dead and native king. This
legend, growing up when Western Europe was torn in pieces by the struggle
about investitures, proves better than the most authentic documents how
the right which Popes denied to Emperors was taken for granted in the
case of an English king. But, while the spoils of England, temporal and
spiritual, were thus scattered abroad among men of the conquering race,
two men at least among them refused all share in plunder which they
deemed unrighteous. One gallant Norman knight, Gulbert of Hugleville,
followed William through all his campaigns, but when English estates were
offered as his reward, he refused to share in unrighteous gains, and went
back to the lands of his fathers which he could hold with a good
conscience. And one monk, Wimund of Saint-Leutfried, not only refused
bishoprics and abbeys, but rebuked the Conqueror for wrong and robbery.
And William bore no grudge against his censor, but, when the
archbishopric of Rouen became vacant, he offered it to the man who had
rebuked him. Among the worthies of England Gulbert and Wimund can hardly
claim a place, but a place should surely be theirs among the men whom
England honours.
* * * * *
The primacy of Lanfranc is one of the most memorable in our history. In
the words of the parable put forth by Anselm in the next reign, the
plough of the English Church was for seventeen years drawn by two oxen of
equal strength. By ancient English custom the Archbishop of Canterbury
was the King’s special counsellor, the special representative of his
Church and people. Lanfranc cannot be charged with any direct
oppression; yet in the hands of a stranger who had his spiritual conquest
to make, the tribunitian office of former archbishops was lost in that of
chief minister of the sovereign. In the first action of their joint
rule, the interest of king and primate was the same. Lanfranc sought for
a more distinct acknowledgement of the superiority of Canterbury over the
rival metropolis of York. And this fell in with William’s schemes for
the consolidation of the kingdom. The political motive is avowed.
Northumberland, which had been so hard to subdue and which still lay open
to Danish invaders or deliverers, was still dangerous. An independent
Archbishop of York might consecrate a King of the Northumbrians, native
or Danish, who might grow into a King of the English. The Northern
metropolitan had unwillingly to admit the superiority, and something
more, of the Southern. The caution of William and his ecclesiastical
adviser reckoned it among possible chances that even Thomas of Bayeux
might crown an invading Cnut or Harold in opposition to his native
sovereign and benefactor.
For some of his own purposes, William had perhaps chosen his minister too
wisely. The objects of the two colleagues were not always the same.
Lanfranc, sprung from Imperialist Pavia, was no zealot for extravagant
papal claims. The caution with which he bore himself during the schism
which followed the strife between Gregory and Henry brought on him more
than one papal censure. Yet the general tendency of his administration
was towards the growth of ecclesiastical, and even of papal, claims.
William never dreamed of giving up his ecclesiastical supremacy or of
exempting churchmen from the ordinary power of the law. But the division
of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the increased frequency of
synods distinct from the general assemblies of the realm—even though the
acts of those synods needed the royal assent—were steps towards that
exemption of churchmen from the civil power which was asserted in one
memorable saying towards the end of William’s own reign. William could
hold his own against Hildebrand himself; yet the increased intercourse
with Rome, the more frequent presence of Roman Legates, all tended to
increase the papal claims and the deference yielded to them. William
refused homage to Gregory; but it is significant that Gregory asked for
it. It was a step towards the day when a King of England was glad to
offer it. The increased strictness as to the marriage of the clergy
tended the same way. Lanfranc did not at once enforce the full rigour of
Hildebrand’s decrees. Marriage was forbidden for the future; the
capitular clergy had to part from their wives; but the vested interest of
the parish priest was respected. In another point William directly
helped to undermine his own authority and the independence of his
kingdom. He exempted his abbey of the Battle from the authority of the
diocesan bishop. With this began a crowd of such exemptions, which, by
weakening local authority, strengthened the power of the Roman see. All
these things helped on Hildebrand’s great scheme which made the clergy
everywhere members of one distinct and exclusive body, with the Roman
Bishop at their head. Whatever tended to part the clergy from other men
tended to weaken the throne of every king. While William reigned with
Lanfranc at his side, these things were not felt; but the seed was sown
for the controversy between Henry and Thomas and for the humiliation of
John.
Even those changes of Lanfranc’s primacy which seem of purely
ecclesiastical concern all helped, in some way to increase the
intercourse between England and the continent or to break down some
insular peculiarity. And whatever did this increased the power of Rome.
Even the decree of 1075 that bishoprics should be removed to the chief
cities of their dioceses helped to make England more like Gaul or Italy.
So did the fancy of William’s bishops and abbots for rebuilding their
churches on a greater scale and in the last devised continental style.
All tended to make England less of another world. On the other hand, one
insular peculiarity well served the purposes of the new primate.
Monastic chapters in episcopal churches were almost unknown out of
England. Lanfranc, himself a monk, favoured monks in this matter also.
In several churches the secular canons were displaced by monks. The
corporate spirit of the regulars, and their dependence on Rome, was far
stronger than that of the secular clergy. The secular chapters could be
refractory, but the disputes between them and their bishops were mainly
of local importance; they form no such part of the general story of
ecclesiastical and papal advance as the long tale of the quarrel between
the archbishops and the monks of Christ Church.
Lanfranc survived William, and placed the crown on the head of his
successor. The friendship between king and archbishop remained unbroken
through their joint lives. Lanfranc’s acts were William’s acts; what the
Primate did must have been approved by the King. How far William’s acts
were Lanfranc’s acts it is less easy to say. But the Archbishop was ever
a trusted minister, and a trusted counsellor, and in the King’s frequent
absences from England, he often acted as his lieutenant. We do not find
him actually taking a part in warfare, but he duly reports military
successes to his sovereign. It was William’s combined wisdom and good
luck to provide himself with a counsellor than whom for his immediate
purposes none could be better. A man either of a higher or a lower moral
level than Lanfranc, a saint like Anselm or one of the mere worldly
bishops of the time, would not have done his work so well. William
needed an ecclesiastical statesman, neither unscrupulous nor
over-scrupulous, and he found him in the lawyer of Pavia, the doctor of
Avranches, the monk of Bec, the abbot of Saint Stephen’s. If Lanfranc
sometimes unwittingly outwitted both his master and himself, if his
policy served the purposes of Rome more than suited the purposes of
either, that is the common course of human affairs. Great men are apt to
forget that systems which they can work themselves cannot be worked by
smaller men. From this error neither William nor Lanfranc was free.
But, from their own point of view, it was their only error. Their work
was to subdue England, soul and body; and they subdued it. That work
could not be done without great wrong: but no other two men of that day
could have done it with so little wrong. The shrinking from needless and
violent change which is so strongly characteristic of William, and less
strongly of Lanfranc also, made their work at the time easier to be done;
in the course of ages it made it easier to be undone.