THE PRIMACY OF ANSELM AND THE ACQUISITION OF NORMANDY.[903]
1093-1097.
[Sidenote: Character of the early years of William Rufus. 1087-1092.]
[Sidenote: Chronological sequence of the history.]
[Sidenote: More complicated character of the next period. 1093-1098.]
[Sidenote: Three distinct sets of contemporary events.]
[Sidenote: Aspects of Rufus with regard to each.]
[Sidenote: Primacy of Anselm.]
[Sidenote: Affairs of Scotland and Wales.]
[Sidenote: Continental schemes.]
[Sidenote: Revolt of Robert of Mowbray. 1095.]
The story of the first five years of the Red King’s reign may be
written with little, if any, forsaking of strict chronological order.
The accession, the rebellion, the affairs of Normandy, the affairs of
Scotland, follow one another in successive or nearly successive years,
as the main subjects which challenge our attention. One set of events
leads to another. The rebellion followed naturally on the accession;
the interference of Rufus in Normandy followed naturally on the
rebellion; the Scottish invasion seems to have been the immediate
occasion of the banishment of Eadgar from Normandy. But during the
whole of the five years there is no great interlacing of different
parts of the main story; at no stage are two distinct sets of events
of equal moment going on at the same time; the historian is hardly
called on to forsake the arrangement of the annalist. While the events
recorded by the annalist were in doing, some of the greatest changes
in English history were silently going on; but they were not changes
of a kind which could be set down in the shape of annals. From the end
of the year which saw the restoration of Carlisle the nature of the
story changes. Different scenes of the drama of equal importance are
now acting at once. For the next five years we have three several
lines of contemporary story, which are now and then intertwined, but
which on the whole did not seriously affect one another. Each is best
told by itself, with as little reference to either of the others as
may be. And each begins in the year of which we have now reached the
threshold. The sixth year of William Rufus saw the beginning of the
primacy of Anselm, the beginning of the main dealings of the reign
with Wales and Scotland, the beginning of renewed interference in the
Norman duchy. It will be well to keep these three lines of narrative
as distinct as may be. They show the Red King in three different
characters. In the first story he appears as the representative of the
new form which the kingship of England has taken with reference both
to temporal and to spiritual matters within the kingdom. In the second
story we see him asserting the powers of the English crown beyond the
kingdom of England, but within the island of Britain. And here,
alongside of the affairs of Scotland, perhaps not very closely
connected with them by any chain of cause and effect, but forming one
general subject with them as distinguished alike from purely domestic
and from continental affairs, will come the relations between England
and Wales during the reign of William Rufus. In the third story we see
the beginning of the events which led to those wider schemes of
continental policy which almost wholly occupy the last three years of
the reign. One event only of much moment stands apart from the general
thread of any of the three stories. It stands by itself, as one of
those events which might easily have led to great changes, but which,
as a matter of fact, passed away without much result. This is the
conspiracy and revolt of Robert of Mowbray and William of Eu, which
may, dramatically at least, be connected with either the Scottish or
the Norman story, but which, as a matter of actual English history,
stands apart from all.
[Sidenote: Relations between Rufus and Anselm.]
[Sidenote: Working of the new ideas.]
[Sidenote: New position of the King.]
[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical position of the Conqueror.]
[Sidenote: William and Lanfranc.]
[Sidenote: Opposite conduct of Rufus.]
[Sidenote: Vacancy of the see of Canterbury. 1089-1093.]
[Sidenote: Its policy.]
[Sidenote: Influence of Randolf Flambard.]
Of these three the first on the list must claim the precedence. The
relations between Rufus and Anselm involve the whole civil and
ecclesiastical policy of the reign. The dispute between King and
Primate was the outcome of all that had been working in silence while
the Red King was winning castles in Normandy, receiving the homage of
Scotland, and enlarging the bounds of England. During those years one
side of the results of the Norman Conquest was put into formal shape.
Between the fall of Rochester and the restoration of Carlisle, new
ideas, new claims, had come to their full growth. Those ideas, those
claims, had made the kingship of William the Red something marked by
not a few points of difference from the kingship either of the
Confessor or of the Conqueror. Nowhere does the difference between the
elder and the younger William stand forth more clearly than in their
dealings with the spiritual power. No king, as I have often shown, was
more truly Supreme Governor of the Church within his realm than was
the Conqueror of England, her defender against the claims of Rome. But
William the Great sought and found his fellow-worker in all things in
an archbishop likeminded with himself. We can hardly conceive the
reign of the Conqueror without the primacy of Lanfranc. But the great
object of William the Red was to avoid the restraints which could not
fail to be placed upon his self-will, if he had one standing at his
side whose place it was to be at once the chief shepherd of the
English Church and the tribune of the English people. For three years
and more from the death of Lanfranc the see of Canterbury remained
vacant. Such a vacancy was without precedent; but it was designed
itself to become a precedent. It was by no accident, from no momentary
cause, that William delayed the appointment of any successor to his
old guardian and counsellor. It was part of a deliberate policy
affecting the whole ecclesiastical and civil institutions of the
realm. And that policy, there can be little doubt, was the device of a
single subtle and malignant genius by whom the whole internal
administration of the Red King’s reign was guided.
§ 1. _The Administration of Randolf Flambard._
1089-1099.
[Sidenote: Early history of Flambard.]
[Sidenote: Said to have been settled in England T. R. E.]
[Sidenote: Said to have been in the service of Bishop Maurice [Bishop
of London 1086-1107].]
[Sidenote: Said to have held the deanery of Twinham.]
[Sidenote: Preferments held by the clerks of kings and bishops.]
[Sidenote: Flambard a priest.]
[Sidenote: Character of Flambard.]
The chief minister, if we may so call him, of William Rufus, during
these years, and indeed to the end of his reign, was that Randolf
Flambard or Passeflambard of whom we have already heard.[904] His
early history is not easy to trace, beyond the general fact that he
rose to power by the same path by which so many others rose in his
day, by service in the King’s chapel and chancery.[905] It has been
generally thought that he was settled in England as early as the days
of Eadward; but it may be doubted whether the evidence bears out this
belief. And the course of his life is certainly easier to understand,
if we do not bring him into England so soon, or attribute to him so
great a length of life, as we must do if we look on him as having been
already a land-owner in England before the Conquest.[906] On the other
hand, if we accept the story which makes him pass to the King’s
service from the service of Maurice Bishop of London, he must have
been the King’s clerk for so short a time before the death of the
Conqueror as hardly to give room for the usual stages of official
promotion. Another version places him in the King’s service from his
earliest years.[907] Perhaps we may guess that the name of the Bishop
of London is wrongly given, and that Flambard had really been in the
service of one of Maurice’s predecessors, of Hugh of Orival or of the
more famous William. His reason for leaving his episcopal patron is
said to have been that a deanery which he held was taken from him, a
story which oddly connects itself with another, according to which he
was at one time dean or other head of the canons of Twinham――better
known as Christchurch――in Hampshire.[908] The story, true or false,
like the earlier life of Thomas of London, illustrates the way in
which the highest ecclesiastical preferments short of bishoprics and
abbeys were held by these clerical servants of kings and bishops.
Clerical they often were only in the widest sense; they were sometimes
merely tonsured, and they seldom took priest’s orders till they were
themselves promoted to bishoprics.[909] Randolf Flambard however was a
priest;[910] he could therefore discharge the duties of his deanery in
person, if he ever troubled himself to go near it. Otherwise there was
very little of the churchman, or indeed of the Christian, about the
future Bishop of Durham and builder of Saint Cuthberht’s nave. At all
events it was wholly by his personal qualities, such as they were,
that Randolf Flambard made his way to the highest places in Church and
State. In his day the Church supplied the readiest opening for the
service of the State, and service to the State was again rewarded by
all but the highest honours of the Church.
[Sidenote: His parents.]
[Sidenote: The name _Flambard_.]
[Sidenote: His financial skill.]
[Sidenote: Mention of him in the Conqueror’s reign.]
[Sidenote: His share in Domesday.]
[Sidenote: His rise under Rufus.]
The man who was practically to rule England had at least little
advantage on the score of birth. He is set before us as the son of a
low-born priest in the diocese of Bayeux and of a mother who bore the
character of a witch, and who was reported to have lost an eye through
the agency of the powers with which she was too familiar.[911]
Handsome in person, ready of wit, free of speech and of hand,
unlearned, loose of life, clever and unscrupulous in business of every
kind, he made friends and he made enemies; but he rose. The surname
which cleaves to him in various shapes and spellings is said to have
been given to him in the court of the Conqueror by the _dispenser_
Robert, because he pushed himself on at the expense of his betters,
like a burning flame.[912] But his genius lay most of all in the
direction of finance, in days when finance meant to transfer, by
whatever means, the greatest amount of the subject’s money into the
coffers of the King. One story describes him as sent on such an errand
by the Conqueror into the lands of his future bishopric, and as
smitten for his crime by the wonder-working hand of Saint Cuthberht
himself.[913] There is every reason to believe that he had a hand in
drawing up the Great Survey.[914] But, while William the Great lived,
he seems not to have risen to any high place. Towards the end of his
reign the Conqueror did begin to give away bishoprics to his own
clerks,[915] but still hardly to such clerks as Randolf Flambard. Nor
did the Conqueror need a minister, in the sense of needing one who
should in some sort fill his place and exercise his powers. The elder
William could rule his kingdom himself, or at most with the advice of
the special counsellor whom ancient custom gave him in the person of
Lanfranc. But the younger William, sultan-like in his mood, needed,
like other sultans, the help of a vizier. And he found the fittest of
all viziers for his purpose in the supple clerk from the Bessin.
[Sidenote: His alleged new Domesday.]
[Sidenote: His official position.]
[Sidenote: He holds the Justiciarship.]
[Sidenote: Growth of the office under him.]
[Sidenote: His “driving” of the Gemóts.]
[Sidenote: He loses his land for the New Forest.]
[Sidenote: His zeal for the King’s interests.]
The reign of Flambard seems to have begun as soon as Lanfranc was
gone. He thoroughly suited the Red King’s views. He was ready to
gather in wealth for his master from every quarter; he knew how to
squeeze the most out of rich and poor; when a tax of a certain amount
was decreed, he knew how to make it bring in double its nominal
value.[916] He alone thoroughly knew his art; no one else, said the
laughing King, cared so little whose hatred he brought on himself, so
that he only pleased his master.[917] He stands charged in one account
of his deeds with declaring the Great Survey to be drawn up on
principles not favourable enough to the royal hoard, and with causing
it to be supplanted by a new inquisition which made the Red King
richer than his father.[918] This story is very doubtful; but it is
thoroughly in character. In any case Flambard rose to the highest
measure both of power and of official dignity that was open to him.
His office and its duties are described in various ways; in that age
official titles and functions were less accurately distinguished than
they were a little later.[919] But there seems no doubt that Flambard,
the lawyer whom none could withstand,[920] held the formal office of
Justiciar. Till his time that post had not, as a distinct office,
reached the full measure of its greatness. It was Flambard himself who
raised it to the height of power and dignity which accompanied it when
it was held by Roger of Salisbury and Randolf of Glanville. He was to
the post of Justiciar what Thomas of London two generations later was
to the post of Chancellor; he was the man who knew how to magnify his
office.[921] In that office “he drave all the King’s gemóts over all
England.”[922] The King’s thegns who had come to the local assembly on
the King’s errand in the days of Æthelred and Cnut[923] had now grown
into a mighty and terrible power. How Flambard drave the gemóts we
learn elsewhere. He was fierce alike to the suppliant and to the
rebel.[924] Suppliant and rebel alike were in his eyes useful only as
means for further filling the mighty chest at Winchester. Strangely
enough, he himself, clerk and Norman as he was, had found neither
birth nor order protect him when the Conqueror had needed a part of
his land for the creation of the New Forest.[925] On the principle
that man is ever most ready to inflict on others the wrongs which he
has borne himself, Flambard, who himself in some sort ranked among the
disinherited, was of all ministers of the royal will the most eager to
draw the heritage of every man, without respect to birth or order,
into the hands of the master whom he served too faithfully.
[Sidenote: His changes and exactions systematic.]
[Sidenote: His alleged spoliation of the rich.]
[Sidenote: His dealings with the Ætheling Henry.]
[Sidenote: Witness of the Chronicle.]
[Sidenote: The King to be every man’s heir.]
[Sidenote: Flambard’s lasting burthens and exactions.]
But we shall altogether misunderstand both Flambard and his master, if
we take either of them for vulgar spoilers, living as it were from
hand to mouth, and casually grasping any sources of gain which chanced
to be thrown in their way. Whatever Flambard did he did according to
rule and system; nay more, he did it according to the severest rules
of logic. Amidst the vague declamations which set him before us as the
general robber of all men, we light on particular facts and phrases
which give us the clue to the real nature of his doings. It is worth
notice that, in more than one picture, the rich are enlarged on as the
special victims of his extortions; in one the Ætheling Henry himself
is spoken of as having suffered deeply at his hands.[926] We may guess
that this has some special reference to the way in which Henry was
defrauded of the lands of his mother, a business in which Flambard is
likely enough to have had a share.[927] These references to the wrongs
done to the rich have their significance; they point to a cunningly
devised system of Flambard’s, by which, the greater a man’s estate
was, the more surely was he marked for extortion. The legislation of
Flambard, if we can call that legislation which seems never to have
been set down in any formal statute,[928] was not at all of the kind
which catches the small flies and lets the large ones get through. As
we have seen in some other cases,[929] a seemingly casual expression
of our native Chronicler is the best record of a matter of no small
constitutional importance. The Red King “would be ilk man’s heir,
ordered and lewd.”[930] In those words lay the whole root of the
matter. The great work of the administration of Flambard, the great
work of the reign of Rufus, was to put in order a system of rules by
which the King might be the heir of every man. Those few words, which
might seem to have dropped from the Chronicler in a moment of
embittered sarcasm, do indeed set forth the formal beginning of a
series of burthens and exactions under which Englishmen, and
preeminently the rich and noble among Englishmen, groaned for not much
less than six hundred years after Flambard’s days.
[Sidenote: The Feudal Tenures.]
[Sidenote: Abolished 1660.]
[Sidenote: Tenure in chivalry.]
[Sidenote: Wardship.]
[Sidenote: Marriage.]
[Sidenote: Dealings with bishoprics and abbeys.]
[Sidenote: Agency of Flambard in systematizing the feudal tenures.]
[Sidenote: The evidence.]
[Sidenote: Henry’s charters.]
[Sidenote: Importance of seemingly casual phrases.]
In short the “unrighteousness” ordained by William Rufus and Randolf
Flambard[931] are no other than those feudal tenures and feudal
burthens which even the Parliament which elected Charles the Second,
in the midst of its self-abasement and betrayal of its own ancient
rights, declared to have been “much more burthensome, grievous, and
prejudicial to the kingdom than they have been beneficial to the
king.”[932] Assuredly they were as burthensome, grievous, and
prejudicial to the kingdom in the eleventh century as they were in the
seventeenth; but assuredly they were found in the eleventh century to
be highly beneficial to the King, or they would not have been ordained
by Rufus and Flambard. We have reached the age of chivalry; and tenure
in chivalry, with all its mean and pettifogging incidents, was put
into a systematic form for the special benefit of the coffers of the
king who was before all things the good knight, the _preux chevalier_,
the _probus miles_. The King “would be the heir of ilk man, ordered
and lewd.” To that end the estate of the minor heir was to be made a
prey; he was himself to be begged and granted and sold like an ox or
an ass;[933] the heiress, maid or widow, was in the like sort to be
begged and granted, sold into unwilling wedlock, or else forced to pay
the price which a chivalrous tenure demanded for the right either to
remain unmarried or to marry according to her own will. The bishopric
or the abbey was to be left without a pastor, and its lands were to be
let to farm for the King’s profit, because the King would be the heir
of the priest as well as of the layman. That all this, in its fully
developed and systematic form, was the work of Randolf Flambard, I
hope I may now assume. I have argued the point at some length
elsewhere,[934] and I need not now do more than pass lightly over some
of the main points. Certain tendencies, certain customs, of which,
under the Conqueror and even before the Conqueror, we see the germs,
but only the germs, appear at the accession of Henry the First as
firmly established rules, which Henry does not promise wholly to
abolish, while he does promise to redress their abuses. It follows
that they had put on their systematic shape in the intermediate time,
that is, during the reign of Rufus. One of these abuses, that which
for obvious reasons was most largely dwelled on by our authorities,
namely the new way of dealing with ecclesiastical property, is
distinctly spoken of as a novelty, and a novelty of Flambard’s
devising. The obvious inference is that the whole system, a system
which logically hangs together in the most perfect way, was the device
of the same subtle and malignant brain. And having got thus far, we
are now enabled to see the full force of those seemingly casual
expressions in the writers of the time of which I have already spoken.
It was the royal claims of relief, of wardship, and marriage,
systematically and mercilessly enforced, no less than the royal claim
to enjoy the fruits of vacant ecclesiastical benefices, which are
branded in Latin as the _injustitiæ_ of Rufus and Flambard, and which
in our own tongue take the shape of the King’s claim to be the heir of
every man.
[Sidenote: Flambard’s theory of land-holding.]
[Sidenote: Relief and redemption.]
[Sidenote: Dealings with men’s wills.]
[Sidenote: Older theory of wills.]
This last pithy phrase takes in all the new claims which were now set
up over all lands, whether held by spiritual or temporal owners, and,
in some cases at least, over personal property also. All the
“unrighteousnesses,” all “the evil customs,” which the charter of
Henry promises to reform[935] come under this one head. In Flambard’s
system of tenure there could be no such thing as an ancient _eðel_ or
_allod_, held of no lord, and burthened only with such payments or
duties as the law might lay upon its owner. With him all land was in
the strictest sense _loanland_.[936] The owner had at most a
life-interest in it; at his death it fell back to the king, for the
king was to be the heir of every man. The king might grant it to the
son of the last owner; but, if so, it was by a fresh grant,[937] for
which the new grantee had to pay. And the terms of Henry’s charter
imply that the payment was arbitrary and extortionate. Henry promises
that the heir of a tenant-in-chief shall not be constrained to
_redeem_――to buy back――his father’s lands as had been done in his
brother’s time; he shall _relieve_ them by a just and lawful
relief.[938] Under Rufus then it was held that the land had, by the
former holder’s death, actually passed to the king, as the common heir
of all men, and that, if the son or other representative of the former
holder wished to possess it, he must, in the strictest sense, buy it
back from the king. Henry acknowledges the rights of the heir, while
still maintaining the theory of the fresh grant. The heir is not to
_redeem_――to buy back――his father’s land; he is merely to _relieve_
it――to take it up again, and he is to pay only the sum prescribed by
legal custom, the equivalent of the ancient heriot or the modern
succession-duty. So it is with personal property. The Red King, it is
plain, claimed to be the heir of men’s money, as well as of their
land. For one of Henry’s promised reforms is that the wills of his
barons and others his men shall stand good, that their money shall go
to the purposes to which they may have bequeathed it, and that, if
they die without wills, their wives, children, kinsfolk, or lawful
men, shall dispose of it as they may think best for the dead man’s
soul.[939] Such a reform could not have been needed unless William
Rufus had been in the habit of interfering with men’s free right of
bequest. And it might have been plausibly argued that the right of
bequest was no natural right of man, that the most ancient legal
doctrine both of Rome and of England was that a will was an
exceptional act, which needed the confirmation of the sovereign power.
If such a doctrine had anyhow come to the knowledge of Flambard, it
would assuredly seem to him a natural inference that no such
confirmation should be granted save at such a price as the king might
see fit to demand.
[Sidenote: Wardship.]
[Sidenote: Its logical character.]
[Sidenote: Its oppressive working.]
But of all the devices of Flambard, there was one which, it would
seem, was specially his own, one which was at once the most oppressive
of all and that which followed most logically from the nature of
feudal tenure. This was the lord’s right of wardship. This claim
starts from the undoubted doctrine that the fief is after all only a
conditional possession of its holder, that he holds it only on the
terms of discharging the military service which is due from it.
Nothing was easier than to argue that, when the fief passed to an heir
who was from his youth incapable of discharging that service, the fief
should go back into the lord’s hands till the heir had reached the
time of life when he could discharge it. The abuses and oppressions
which such a right led to need hardly be dwelled on; they are written
in every page of our legal history from the days of Rufus to the days
of Charles the First. Nothing now enriches an estate like a long
minority; in those times the heir, when at last he came into
possession, found his estate impoverished in every way by the
temporary occupation of the king or of the king’s favourite to whom
the wardship had been granted or sold. Yet it cannot be denied that
the argument by which the right of wardship was established was, as a
piece of legal argument, quite unanswerable. And of all the feudal
exactions certainly none was more profitable. The tenant-in-chief who
died, perhaps fighting in the king’s cause, and who left an infant son
behind him, had the comfort of thinking that his estate would, perhaps
for the next twenty years, go to enrich the coffers of his sovereign.
On this head Henry speaks less clearly than he speaks on some other
points; but his words certainly seem to imply that the wardship of the
tenant-in-chief was to go, not to the king, but to the mother or to
some kinsman.[940] If so, either Henry himself or his successors
thought better of the matter. The right of wardship, as a privilege of
the king or other lord, appears in full force in the law-book of
Randolf of Glanville.[941]
[Sidenote: Extent of Flambard’s changes.]
[Sidenote: Wardship and marriage special to England and Normandy.]
[Sidenote: The two sides of feudalism.]
[Sidenote: England in what sense feudal.]
[Sidenote: Flambard the lawgiver of English feudalism.]
When we attribute all these exactions and “unrighteousnesses” to the
device of Flambard, it is of course not meant that they were
altogether unheard of either before his day or beyond the lands over
which his influence reached. Traces of these claims, or of some of
them, are to be found wherever and whenever feudal notions about the
tenure of land had crept in. All that is meant is that claims which
were vaguely growing up were put by Flambard into a distinct and
systematic shape. What William the Great did on occasion, for reasons
of state, William the Red did as a matter of course, as an ordinary
means of making money.[942] And it is significant that two of the most
oppressive of these claims, that of wardship and the kindred claim of
marriage, were, in their fully developed shape, peculiar or nearly so
to the lands where Rufus reigned and Flambard governed, to the English
kingdom and the Norman duchy.[943] I have said elsewhere that, of the
two sides of feudalism, our Norman kings carefully shut out the side
which tended to weaken the royal power, and carefully fostered the
side which tended to strengthen it.[944] Both sides of this process
were busily at work during the reign of Rufus. The great law of the
Conqueror, the law of Salisbury, which decreed that duty to the king
should come before all other duties, was practically tried and
practically confirmed in the struggle which showed that no man in
England was strong enough to stand against the king.[945] England was
not to become feudal in the sense in which Germany and France became
feudal. But in all those points where the doctrines of feudal tenure
could be turned to the king’s enrichment, England became of all lands
the most feudal. Enactor of no statute, author of no code or law-book,
Randolf Flambard was in effect the lawgiver of feudalism, so far as
that misleading word has any meaning at all on English soil.
[Sidenote: Flambard’s oppression falls most directly on the greatest
estates.]
[Sidenote: No special oppression of the native English.]
[Sidenote: Indirect oppression of other classes.]
[Sidenote: Dealings of the tenants-in-chief with their under-tenants.]
[Sidenote: Strange submission of the nobles.]
[Sidenote: Position of the king’s clerks.]
[Sidenote: The reign of unlaw.]
[Sidenote: General submission.]
All this exactly falls in with those phrases in our authorities which
speak of Flambard as the spoiler of the rich, the plunderer of the
inheritances of other men. It also bears out what I have said
already,[946] that there is no evidence to show that Rufus was a
direct oppressor of the native English as such. The subtle devices of
tyranny of which we have just spoken directly concerned those only who
were the King’s tenants-in-chief. That is to say, they touched a class
of estates which were far more largely in Norman than in English
hands. Most likely, even in that reign, a numerical majority of the
King’s tenants-in-chief would have been found to be of English blood.
But such a majority would have been chiefly made up of the very
smallest members of the class; the greater landowners, those whose
wrongs, under such a system, would be, if not heavier, at least more
conspicuous, were mainly the conquerors of Senlac or their sons. It
was a form of oppression which would strike men as specially falling
upon the rich. A special meaning is thus given to phrases which might
otherwise be thought to be merely those common formulæ which, in
speaking of any evil which affects all classes, join rich and poor
together. The devices of Flambard were specially aimed at the rich.
The great mass of the English people, and that large class of Normans
who held their lands, not straight of the king but of some
intermediate lord, were touched by them only when the lords who
suffered by Flambard’s exactions tried to make good their own losses
by exactions of the same kind on their own tenants. That they did so
is shown by the reforming charter of Henry. When he promises to deal
fairly and lawfully by his barons and his other men in the matters of
relief and marriage, he demands that his barons shall deal fairly and
lawfully by their men in the like cases.[947] But in the first
instance it was mainly the rich, mainly the Normans, whom the feudal
devices of Flambard touched. And it is not the least strange thing in
these times to see a race of warlike and high-spirited nobles,
conquerors or sons of conquerors, submit to so galling a yoke, a yoke
which must have been all the more galling when we think of the origin
and position of the man by whom it was devised. We cannot think that
the king’s clerks were ever a popular body with any class, high or
low, native or foreign. Their position appealed to no sentiment of any
kind, military, religious, or national; their rule rather implied the
treading under foot of all such sentiments. The military tenants must
have looked on them with the dislike which men of the sword, specially
in such an age, are apt to look on the rule of men of the pen. In the
eyes of strict churchmen they must have passed for ungodly scorners of
the decencies of their order. To the mass of the people they must have
seemed foreign extortioners, and nothing more. They represented the
power of the king, and nothing else. In some states of things the
power of the king, even of a despotic king, may be welcomed as the
representative of law against force. But under Rufus the power of the
king was before all things the representative of unlaw. Yet though all
murmured, all submitted. The son of the poor priest of the Bessin,
clothed with a power purely official, lorded it over all classes and
orders. Earls, prelates, and people, were alike held down by the guide
and minister of the royal will.
[Sidenote: Position of Rufus favourable for his schemes.]
[Sidenote: Effect on national unity.]
One cause of this general submission is doubtless to be found in the
immediate circumstances of the time. The alliance of the King and the
English people had for the moment broken the power of the Norman
nobles. The ecclesiastical estate was left without a head by the death
of Lanfranc. The popular estate was left without a head, as soon as
the King turned away from the people who had given him his crown, and
broke all the promises that he had made to them. There was no power of
combination; the great days when nobles, clergy, and commons, could
join together against the king, as three orders in one nation, were
yet far distant. Each class had to bear its own grievances as it
could; no class could get any help from any other class; and the
King’s picked mercenaries, kept at the expense of all classes, were
stronger than any one class by itself. Yet we cannot doubt that even
the rule of Rufus and Flambard did something towards the great work of
founding national unity. All the inhabitants of the land, if they had
nothing else in common, had common grievances and a common oppressor.
For a moment we can believe that the English people would feel a
certain pleasure in seeing the men who had once conquered them and
whom they had more lately conquered, brought under the yoke, and under
such a yoke as that of Flambard. But such a feeling would be
short-lived compared with the far deeper feeling of common grievances
and common enmities.
[Sidenote: Other forms of exaction.]
[Sidenote: Working of the old laws.]
[Sidenote: “Driving” of the Gemóts.]
[Sidenote: Witness of Henry’s charter.]
For the yoke of Flambard was one which, in different ways, pressed on
all classes. If the native English, and the less wealthy men
generally, were less directly touched by his feudal legislation than
those who ranked above them, Flambard had no mind to let poor men, or
native Englishmen, or any other class of men, go scot free. If his new
devices pressed mainly on the great, he knew how to use the old forms
of law so as to press on great and small alike. No one was too high,
no one was too low, for the ministers of the King’s Exchequer to keep
their eyes on him. No source of profit was deemed too small or too
mean, if the coffers of a chivalrous king could be filled by it. If
Flambard sought to seize upon every man’s heritage, he also _drave_
all the King’s gemóts over all England. We have no details; but it is
easy to see how the ancient assemblies, and the judicial and
administrative business which was done in them, might be turned into
instruments of extortion. We have seen that the worst criminals could
win their pardon by a bribe,[948] and means might easily be found, by
false charges and by various tricks of the law, for wringing money out
of the innocent as well as the guilty. We may again turn to Henry’s
charter. It is a very speaking clause which forgives all “pleas” and
debts due to his brother, except certain classes of them which were
held to be due of lawful right.[949] In the days of Rufus and Flambard
the presumption was that a demand made on behalf of the crown was
unlawful.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Dealings with church property.]
[Sidenote: Appointment and investiture of bishops and abbots.]
[Sidenote: Grant of the temporalities by the king.]
[Sidenote: Church lands become fiefs.]
[Sidenote: Flambard’s inferences.]
[Sidenote: Analogy between lay and ecclesiastical fiefs.]
[Sidenote: Vacant prelacies held by the King.]
[Sidenote: Power of prolonging the vacancy.]
[Sidenote: Sale of bishoprics and abbeys.]
[Sidenote: Innovations of Rufus.]
[Sidenote: Earlier cases of simony.]
[Sidenote: Not systematic before Rufus.]
[Sidenote: Treatment of vacant churches.]
[Sidenote: Flambard the chief agent.]
But there is one form of the exactions of the Red King which, for
obvious reasons, stands forth before all others in the pages of the
writers of the time. When the King would be the heir of every man, he
was fully minded to be the heir of the clerk or the monk as well as of
the layman. And Flambard, priest and chaplain as he was, had no mind
to sacrifice the interests of his master to the interests of his
order. By his suggestion William began early in his reign, as soon as
the influence of Lanfranc was withdrawn, to make himself in a special
way the heir of deceased bishops and abbots. These great spiritual
lords were among the chief land-owners of the kingdom. The kings
therefore naturally claimed to have a voice in their appointment. They
invested the new prelate with his ring and staff; and this right, so
fiercely denied to the successor of Augustus, was exercised without
dispute by the successor of Cerdic and Rolf.[950] The new prelate
received, by the king’s writ, as a grant from the king, the temporal
possessions which were attached to the spiritual office.[951] We have
seen that this action on the part of the king by no means wholly shut
out action either on the part of the local ecclesiastical body or on
the part of the great council of the kingdom.[952] But it was from the
king personally that the newly chosen or newly nominated prelate
received the actual investiture of his office and its temporalities.
The temporalities with which he was invested might have their special
rights and privileges; but at least they were not exempt from the
three burthens which no land could escape, among which was the duty of
providing men for military service in case of need.[953] As feudal
ideas grew, the inference was easy that lands granted by the king and
charged with military service were a fief held of the king by a
military tenure. We have seen signs of change in that direction in the
days of the Conqueror;[954] in the days of Rufus the doctrine was
fully established, and it was pushed to its logical results by the
lawyer-like ingenuity of Flambard. If the lands held by a bishop or
abbot were a fief held by military tenure, they must be liable to the
same accidents as other fiefs of the same kind. When a bishop or abbot
died, or otherwise vacated his office, the result was the same as when
the lay holder of a fief died without leaving an heir of full age.
There was the fief; but there was no one ready to perform the duties
with which it was charged. The fief must therefore fall back to the
lord till it should be granted afresh to some one who could discharge
those duties. The king thus, in the words of the Chronicler, became
the heir of the deceased bishop or abbot, even more thoroughly than he
became the heir of the deceased baron or other lay tenant-in-chief.
For in the latter case, except when the late holder’s family became
extinct by his death, there was always some one person who had by all
law and custom a right above all other men to succeed him. The son or
other natural successor might be constrained to buy back the lands of
the _ancestor_,[955] or, if a minor, he might be kept out of them till
his time of wardship was over. Still even Flambard would have allowed
that such a natural successor had, if he could pay the price demanded,
a claim upon the land which was not shared by any one else. But on the
lands of a deceased bishop or abbot no man, even of his own order, had
any better claim than another till such a claim was created by
election or nomination. The king was the only heir; the lands and all
the other property of the vacant office passed into his hands; and, as
no election or nomination could hold good without his consent, it was
in his power to prolong his possession as heir as long as he thought
good. That is to say, by the new device of Flambard, when a bishop or
abbot died, the king at once entered on his lands, and kept them as
long as the see or abbey remained vacant. And, as it rested with the
king when the see or abbey should be filled, he could prolong the
vacancy for any time that he thought good. And William Rufus commonly
thought good to prolong the vacancy till some one offered him such a
price in ready money as made it worth his while to put an end to
it.[956] The result was that, in the words of the Chronicler, “God’s
Church was brought low.”[957] The great ecclesiastical offices, as
they fell vacant, were either kept vacant for the King’s profit, or
else were sold for his profit to men who, by the very act of buying
them, were shown to be unworthy to hold them.[958] We are distinctly
told that this practice was an innovation of the days of Rufus, and
that it was an innovation of which Flambard was the author.[959] The
charge of simony, like all other charges of bribery and corruption, is
often much easier to bring than to disprove; but it is not likely to
be spoken of as a systematic practice, unless it undoubtedly happened
in a good many cases. We have come across cases in our earlier history
where it was at least suspected that ecclesiastical offices had been
sold, or, what proves even more, that they were looked on as likely to
be sold.[960] And that the practice was common among continental
princes there can be little doubt. But there is nothing to make us
believe that it was at all systematic in England at any earlier time,
and the Conqueror at all events was clear from all scandal of the
kind. But the chain of reasoning devised by Flambard would make it as
fair a source of profit for the king to take money on the grant of a
bishopric as to take it on the grant of a lay fief. And there is no
reason to doubt that Rufus systematically acted on this principle, and
that, save at the moment of his temporary repentance, he seldom or
never gave away a bishopric or abbey for nothing. The other point of
the charge, that bishoprics and abbeys were kept vacant while the king
received the profits, was not a matter of surmise or suspicion, but a
matter of fact open to all men. When a prelate died, one of the king’s
clerks was sent to take down in writing a full account of all his
possessions. All was taken into the king’s hands. Sometimes the king
granted out the lands for money or on military tenure, in which case
the new prelate, when one was appointed, might have some difficulty in
getting them back.[961] In other cases the king kept the property in
his own hands, letting it out at the highest rent that he could get,
and, as his father did with the royal demesnes, at once making void
his bargains if a higher price was offered.[962] In the case of the
abbeys and of those churches of secular canons where the episcopal and
capitular estates were not yet separated, the king took the whole
property of the church, and allowed the monks or canons only a
wretched pittance.[963] We have seen that, in one case where local
gratitude has recorded that he did otherwise, it is marked as an
exception to his usual practice.[964] And, in all these doings,
Flambard, as he was the deviser of the system, was its chief
administrator. The vacant prelacies were put under his management; he
extorted, for his own profit and for the king’s, such sums both from
the monks or clergy and from the tenants of the church lands that they
all said that it was better to die than to live.[965]
[Sidenote: The practice a new one.]
[Sidenote: The olden practice.]
[Sidenote: Tenure in _frank-almoign_.]
[Sidenote: Odo Abbot of Chertsey resigns, 1092.]
[Sidenote: Restored by Henry, 1100.]
These doings on the part of Rufus are by the writers of the time put
in marked contrast with the practice of earlier kings, and especially
with the practice of his own father. As the old and inborn kings had
done nothing of the kind, so neither had the Conqueror from beyond
sea. In their days, when an abbot or bishop died, his spiritual
superior, the bishop of the diocese or the archbishop of the province,
administered the estates of his church during the vacancy, bestowing
the income to pious and charitable uses, and handing the estates over
to the new prelate on his appointment.[966] In later legal language,
the guardian of the spiritualties was also the guardian of the
temporalities. Bishoprics and abbeys were dealt with as smaller
preferments have always been dealt with, as holdings in _frank-almoign_.
The novelty lay, not in receiving the bishopric or abbey from the
king, but in receiving it on the terms of a lay fief. One prelate, Odo
Abbot of Chertsey, the Norman successor of the English Wulfwold,[967]
resigned his post rather than hold it on such terms.[968] For the rest
of the reign of Rufus the estates of the abbey were left in the hands
of Flambard. One of the earliest among the reforms of Henry and Anselm
was the restoration of Odo.[969]
[Sidenote: Vacancies longer in abbeys than in bishoprics.]
[Sidenote: Walkelin dies. Jan. 3, 1098.]
[Sidenote: Osmund dies. Dec. 3, 1099.]
[Sidenote: Differences between bishoprics and abbeys.]
[Sidenote: Case of Peterborough. 1098.]
[Sidenote: English abbots.]
[Sidenote: Story of the appointment to an unnamed abbey.]
If we look more minutely into the chronology of this reign, it will
appear that these long vacancies were more usual in the case of the
abbeys than in that of the bishoprics. At the time of William’s death
he had in his hands, besides the archbishopric of the absent Anselm,
the two bishoprics of Winchester and Salisbury and eleven abbeys.[970]
Of these Winchester had been vacant rather more than two years and a
half, Salisbury had been vacant only eight months. And the bishoprics
which were filled in his reign had mostly been vacant one, two, or at
most three years, shorter times than bishoprics were often kept vacant
in much later times.[971] The reason for the difference seems clear.
The bishoprics, when they were filled, commonly went to the king’s
clerks, to Flambard himself and his fellows. The great temporal
position of a bishopric was acceptable to men of this class, and they
found in the king’s service the means of making up a purse such as
would tempt the king to end the vacancy in their favour[972]. A
bishopric was therefore likely to be filled, unworthily filled
doubtless, but still filled, before any very long time had passed. The
abbeys, on the other hand, would have small attractions for the king’s
servants, who in fact, as secular clerks, could not hold them. And the
men for whom such a post would have attractions, the monks of the
vacant abbey or the abbots or priors of lesser houses, would not have
the same means as the king’s servants of making up a purse. The abbeys
therefore were likely to remain vacant longer than the bishoprics.
When they were filled, it was not without simony, or at least not
without a payment of some kind to the King. For it is rather harsh to
apply the word simony to the payment by which the monks of
Peterborough bought of the King the right to choose an abbot freely――a
free _congé d’élire_ in short, without any letter missive.[973]
Another thing may be noticed. The bishops appointed at this time all
bear Norman names; Normans were the most likely men to find their way
into the King’s chapel and chancery. But the abbots are still not
uncommonly English.[974] Rufus, who welcomed brave mercenaries from
any quarter, also welcomed bribes from any quarter, with little of
narrow prejudice for or against particular nations. An English monk
was as likely as his Norman fellow to have, by some means quite
inconsistent with his rule, scraped together money enough to purchase
preferment. And when a body of monks bought the right of free
election, they were likely to choose an Englishman rather than a
stranger. At all times the kings interfered less with the elections to
abbeys than they did with the elections to bishoprics.[975] And, if
there is any truth, even as a legendary illustration, in a tale which
is told both of Rufus and of other kings, there were moments when the
Red King could prefer a practical joke to a bribe. An abbey――the name
is not given――is vacant; two of its monks come to the King, trying to
outbid one another in offers of money for the vacant office. A third
brother has come with them, and the King asks what he will give. He
answers that he will not give anything; he has simply come to receive
the new abbot, whoever he may be, and to take him home with all
honour. Rufus at once bestows the abbey on him, as the only one of the
party worthy of it.[976] The tale is not impossible; had it been
placed in Normandy and not in England, we might have even said that it
was not unlikely. For we shall see, as we go on, that, from whatever
cause, Rufus dealt with ecclesiastical matters in Normandy in a
different spirit from that in which he dealt with them in England.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Sees vacant in 1092.]
[Sidenote: Ralph Luffa Bishop of Chichester. 1091-1123.]
[Sidenote: Death of William Bishop of Thetford. 1091.]
[Sidenote: Herbert Losinga.]
[Sidenote: Prior of Fécamp.]
[Sidenote: Abbot of Ramsey. 1087.]
[Sidenote: He buys the see of Thetford.]
[Sidenote: Three years’ vacancy of New Minster. 1088-1091.]
[Sidenote: Robert Losinga Abbot. 1091-1093.]
[Sidenote: Herbert repents and receives his bishopric again from the
Pope, c. 1093.]
[Sidenote: Novelty of Herbert’s act.]
At the point which we have reached in our general story, the time of
the restoration of Carlisle, two English sees only were vacant. Two
had been filled during the year of the Norman campaign, and both of
them by prelates of some personal mark. Ralph Luffa, Bishop of
Chichester, holds a high place in the history of his own church, as
the founder alike of the existing fabric and of the existing
constitution of its chapter.[977] He bears altogether so good a
character that he is not likely to have come to a bishopric in the way
which was usual in the days of Rufus. Did the King give him his staff
in some passing better moment, like that in which he gave the staff to
the worthy abbot at the nameless monastery? But the other episcopal
appointment of the same year was one of the usual kind, as far as the
motive of the appointment went, though the person to whom the
bishopric was given or sold was not one of the class who in this reign
commonly profited by such transactions. Bishop William of Thetford,
the successor of the unlearned Herfast,[978] died in the year of
negotiations, the year of the peace with Robert and the peace with
Malcolm.[979] His bishopric was not long kept vacant; before the end
of the year the church of Thetford had a new pastor, and one who plays
no small part in local history. This was the famous Herbert
Losinga,[980] who, if we may trust such accounts of him as we have,
made so bad a beginning and so good an ending. Norman by birth, an
immediate countryman of the Conqueror, as sprung from the land of
Hiesmes, a man of learning and evident energy, he became a monk of
Fécamp and prior of that great house.[981] Early in the reign of Rufus
or in the last days of the Conqueror, he was raised to the abbey of
Ramsey, when the long and varied life of Æthelsige came to an
end.[982] He now, on Bishop William’s death, at once bought for
himself the see of Thetford for one thousand pounds.[983] Before the
end of the year he was consecrated by Archbishop Thomas of York,
making his profession to a future Archbishop of Canterbury.[984] At
the same time he also bought preferment for his father Robert, who, it
must be supposed, had embraced the monastic life. The New Minster of
Winchester had now been for three years, since the death of its last
Abbot Ralph, in the hands of Flambard.[985] Herbert now bought the
abbacy for his father.[986] This twofold simony naturally gave great
offence, and formed a fertile subject for the eloquence of the time,
both in prose and verse.[987] The reign of the father was short; two
years later Flambard again held the wardship of New Minster.[988] The
career of the son in his East-Anglian bishopric was longer and more
varied, and we shall come across him again in the course of our story.
At present it is only needful to say that Herbert very soon repented
of the shameful way by which he had climbed into the sheepfold, that
he went to Rome, that he gave up his ill-gotten bishopric into the
hands of Pope Urban, and received his staff from him again in what was
deemed to be a more regular way.[989] Herbert’s repentance was to his
credit; and, as things stood at the moment, there was perhaps no
better way of making amends. But the course which he took was not only
one which was sure to bring on him the displeasure of the Red King; it
was in the teeth of all the customs of William the Great and of the
kings before him. A journey to Rome, without the royal licence, and
seemingly taken by stealth,[990] the submission to a Pope whom the
King had not acknowledged,[991] the surrender to any Pope of the staff
which he had received from the King of the English, were all of them
offences, and the last act was distinctly a novelty. Ulf, Ealdred,
Thomas, Remigius, had all been deprived of their staves and had
received them again;[992] but no English prelate of those times had of
his own act made the Pope his judge in such a matter. When the holy
Wulfstan was threatened with deposition, he had, even in the legend,
given back his staff, not to the Pope who ruled at Rome, but to the
King who slept at Westminster.[993] No wonder then that the Red King
was moved to anger by a slight to his authority which his father could
not have overlooked, and which might have stirred the Confessor
himself to one of his passing fits of wrath. The return of Herbert
from Rome forms part of a striking group of events to which we shall
presently come.
[Sidenote: Vacancy of Lincoln. 1092-1094.]
[Sidenote: Vacancy of Canterbury. 1089-1093.]
The two bishoprics of Chichester and Thetford were thus filled soon
after they became vacant. In the year after the consecration of Ralph
and Herbert, a third see, as we have seen, fell vacant by the death of
Remigius of Lincoln.[994] That see was not filled so speedily as
Chichester and Thetford had been; still it did not remain vacant so
long as some of the abbeys. But a longer vacancy befell, a lasting
vacancy seemed designed to befall, the mother church of all of them.
All this while the metropolitan throne of Canterbury remained empty.
No successor to Lanfranc was chosen or nominated; it was the fixed
purpose of the Red King to make no nomination himself, to allow no
choice on the part of the ecclesiastical electors. Here at least the
doctrines of Randolf Flambard were to be carried out in their fulness.
It is the state of ecclesiastical matters during this memorable
vacancy, and the memorable nomination which at last ended it, which
call for our main attention at this stage of our story.
§ 2. _The Vacancy of the Primacy and the Appointment of Anselm.
1089-1093._
[Sidenote: Effects of the vacancy of the see of Canterbury.]
[Sidenote: Special position of the metropolitan see.]
[Sidenote: Its antiquity and dignity.]
[Sidenote: Place of the Archbishop in the assembly.]
[Sidenote: His leadership of the nation.]
[Sidenote: Appointments to the archbishopric.]
[Sidenote: Thomas of London. 1162.]
[Sidenote: The King’s fixed purpose to keep the see vacant.]
It needs some little effort of the imagination fully to take in all
that is implied in a four years’ vacancy of the see of Canterbury in
the eleventh century. For the King to keep any bishopric vacant in
order to fill his coffers with its revenues was a new and an
unrighteous thing, against which men cried out as at once new and
unrighteous. But to deal in this way with the see of Canterbury was
something which differed in kind from the like treatment of any other
see. That the bishopric of Lincoln was vacant, that the Bishop of
Durham was in banishment, was mainly a local grievance. The churches
of Lincoln and Durham suffered; they were condemned to what, in the
language of the times, was called a state of widowhood. The tenants of
those churches suffered all that was implied in being handed over from
a milder lord to a harsher one. The dioceses were defrauded of
whatever advantages might have flowed from the episcopal
superintendence of Robert Bloet or of William of Saint-Calais. But the
general affairs of the Church and realm might go on much the same;
there was one councillor less in the gemót or the synod, and that was
all. It was another thing when the patriarchal throne was left vacant,
when Church and realm were deprived of him who in a certain sense
might be called the head of both. An Archbishop of Canterbury was
something more than merely the first of English bishops. Setting aside
his loftier ecclesiastical claims as the second Pontiff of a second
world, he held within the realm of England itself a position which was
wholly his own.[995] He held an office older and more venerable than
the crown itself. There were indeed kings in England before there were
bishops; but there were Archbishops of Canterbury before there were
Kings of the English. The successor of Augustine, the “head of
Angle-kin,”[996] had been the embodiment of united English national
life, in days when the land was still torn in pieces by the rivalry of
the kings of this or that corner of it.[997] This lofty position
survived the union of the kingdoms; it survived the transfer of the
united kingdom to a foreign Conqueror. Lanfranc stood by the side of
William, as Dunstan had stood by the side of Eadgar. In every
gathering of the Church and of the people, in every synod, in every
gemót, the Archbishop of Canterbury held a place which had no equal or
second, a place which was shared by no other bishop or earl or
ætheling. If we reckon the King as the head of the assembly, the
Archbishop is its first member. If we reckon the King as a power
outside the assembly, the Archbishop is himself its head. He is the
personal counsellor of the King, the personal leader of the nation, in
a way in which no other man in the realm could be said to be. As of
old, under the Empire of Rome, each town had its _defensor civitatis_,
so now, under the kingship of England, the successor of Augustine
might be said to hold the place of _defensor regni_. The position
which Lanfranc had held, and in which during these dreary years he had
no successor, was a position wholly unlike that of the class of
bishops to which we are now getting accustomed, royal officials who
received bishoprics as the payment of their temporal services. It was
equally unlike that of the statesman-bishops of later times, who might
or might not forget the bishop in the statesman, but whose two
characters, ecclesiastical and temporal, were quite distinct and in no
way implied one another. An archbishop of those times was a statesman
by virtue of his spiritual office; he was the moral guardian and moral
mouth-piece of the nation. The ideal archbishop was at once saint,
scholar, and statesman; of the long series from Augustine to Lanfranc,
some had really united all those characters; none perhaps had been
altogether lacking in all three. Hence the special care with which men
were chosen for so great a place both before and for some time after
the time with which we are dealing. The king’s clerks, his chancellor,
his treasurer, even his larderer,[998] might beg or buy some bishopric
of less account; but, seventy years after this time, the world was
amazed when King Henry bethought him of placing Chancellor Thomas, not
in the seat of Randolf of Durham or Roger of Salisbury, but in the
seat of Ælfheah, Anselm, and Theobald.[999] The surprise which was
then called forth by what was looked on as a new-fangled and wrongful
nomination to the archbishopric of Canterbury may help us to judge of
the surprise and horror and despair which came over the minds of men,
as it became plain that the wish, perhaps the fixed purpose, of the
Red King was to get rid of archbishops of Canterbury altogether.
[Sidenote: The King’s motives.]
[Sidenote: The estates of the see.]
[Sidenote: Further motives.]
The motives of the King are plain. He sought something more than
merely to get possession of the rich revenues of the archbishopric,
though that was doubtless not a small matter in the policy of either
Rufus or Flambard. The estates of the see of Canterbury furnished a
very perceptible addition to the royal income, and they gave the King
a convenient means of rewarding some of his favourites, to whom he
granted archiepiscopal lands on military tenure.[1000] Lanfranc
himself had already done something like this;[1001] but the usual
tendency of lands so granted to pass away from the Church would be
greatly strengthened when it was not the Archbishop, but the King, at
whose hands they had been received, and to whom the first homage had
been paid. But all this was doubtless very secondary. In the case of
other sees it was a mere reckoning of profit; Rufus had no objection
to fill them at once, if any one would make it worth his while to do
so. But it is plain that he had a fixed determination to keep the
archbishopric vacant, if possible, for ever, at all events as long as
the patience of his kingdom would endure such a state of things. To
Rufus, whether as man or as king, the appointment of an archbishop was
the thing of all others which was least to be wished. To fill the see
of Canterbury would be at once to set up a disagreeable monitor by his
side, and to put some check on the reign of unright and unlaw, public
and private. William doubtless remembered how, as long as Lanfranc
lived, he had had to play an unwilling part, and to put a bridle on
his worst and most cherished instincts. An archbishop of his own
naming could not indeed have the personal authority of his ancient
guardian; but any archbishop would have a charge to speak in the name
of the Church and the nation in a way which could hardly be pleasing
in his ears. The metropolitan see therefore remained unfilled till the
day when William Rufus became for a short season another man.
[Sidenote: No fear of a bad appointment.]
[Sidenote: Primates between Anselm and Thomas.]
It is worth remarking that what might have seemed a very obvious way
out of the difficulty clearly did not come into the head of the King
or of any one else. The long vacancy of the archbishopric made men
uneasy; they were grieved and amazed as to what might happen in so
unusual a case; but they felt sure that the present distress must end
some time, and they seem to have taken for granted that, when it did
end, it would end by the appointment of some one worthy of the place.
Men were troubled at the King’s failure to appoint any archbishop;
they do not seem to have been at all troubled by fear that he might
appoint a bad archbishop.[1002] Rufus himself seems never to have
thought of granting or selling the metropolitan see to any of his own
creatures, to Flambard for instance or to Robert Bloet. He might so
deal with Lincoln or Durham; something within or without him kept him
from so dealing with Canterbury. It is throughout taken for granted
that the choice lay between a good archbishop or none at all. A good
archbishop was the yoke-fellow of a good king, the reprover of an evil
king. William Rufus wanted neither of those. But even William Rufus
had not gone so far, his subjects did not suspect him of going so far,
as to think of appointing an evil archbishop in order to be the tool
of an evil king. The precedent of making the patriarchal throne of
Britain the reward of merely temporal services[1003] did not come till
it had been filled by four more primates, all taken from the regular
orders, numbering among them at least one saint and one statesman, but
no mere royal official. The first degradation of the archbishopric led
to its greatest exaltation, in the person of Thomas of London. But
Thomas of London, even in his most worldly days, was a very different
person from Randolf Flambard.
[Sidenote: Seemingly no thought of election.]
[Sidenote: No action of the monks.]
[Sidenote: No action of the Witan.]
[Sidenote: Silent endurance of the action.]
Another point to be remarked is how utterly the notion either of
ecclesiastical election or of election in the Great Council of the
realm seems to have passed away. There is nothing like an attempt at
the choice of an archbishop, either by the monks of Christ Church, the
usual electors, or by the suffragan bishops, who afterwards claimed
the right. It might have been too daring a step if the monks had done
as they once had done in the days of King Eadward,[1004] if they had
chosen an archbishop freely, and then asked for the King’s approval of
their choice. Eadward had rejected the prelate so chosen; William
Rufus might have done something more than reject him. But we do not
hear of their even venturing to petition for leave to elect; they do
not, like the monks of Peterborough,[1005] make such a petition, and
enforce it by the strongest of arguments. Nor do bishops, earls,
thegns, the nation at large, venture to act, any more than the monks.
They murmur, and that is all. No action on the subject is recorded to
have been taken in any of the gemóts till the vacancy had lasted
nearly four years; and we shall see that the action which was at last
taken showed more strongly than anything else that, as far as this
world was concerned, it rested wholly with the King whether England
should ever again have another primate or not. Through the whole time,
the nation suffers, but it suffers in silence. We have already had to
deal with a king on whose nod all things human and divine were held to
hang;[1006] we are now dealing with a king who would have no petition
made, no act ascribed, within his realm, to any God or man except
himself.[1007]
[Sidenote: Results, of the vacancy.]
[Sidenote: Corruption of the clergy.]
[Sidenote: Fiscal spirit of the time.]
[Sidenote: Effects of the lack of ecclesiastical discipline.]
The state of things during the time when William Rufus held firm to
his purpose that no man should be archbishop but himself,[1008] and
when the revenues of the archbishopric were paid into the hands of
Randolf Flambard,[1009] was one of general corruption. It is
immediately after recording the King’s way of dealing with bishoprics
and abbeys that one of our chief guides breaks forth into his most
vehement protest against the vices of the time, and specially against
the corruption and degradation of the clergy.[1010] That they took to
secular callings, that they became pleaders of causes and farmers of
revenues, was not wonderful. Under the rule of Flambard there
were endless openings for employments of this kind, employments for
which, as in the case of Flambard himself, the clerk was commonly
better fitted than the layman. And the general fiscal spirit of the
time, the endless seeking after gold and silver of which the King set
the example, naturally spread through all classes; every rich man, we
are told, turned money-changer.[1011] The constant demands for actual
coin, the large outlay of actual coin in the payment of the King’s
mercenaries, must have led to an increased activity in the circulation
of the precious metals. The newly-come Jews, strong in royal favour,
doubtless found their account in this turn of things; but some classes
of Christians seem to have found their account in it also. But,
besides all this, the writers of the time seem clearly to connect the
frightful profligacy of the time, specially rife among the King’s
immediate following, with the vacancy of the archbishopric. It is true
that things were not much better in Normandy, where the good soul of
Archbishop William must have been daily grieved at the unlawful deeds
of almost every one around him. But an Archbishop of Rouen had never
been held to have the same authority over either prince or people as
an Archbishop of Canterbury. Whatever power, moral or formal, was at
any time wielded by the ecclesiastical state for the reformation of
manners was altogether in abeyance, now that there was no Primate
either to call together a synod of the national Church or to speak
with that personal authority which belonged to none of the chiefs of
the national Church but himself. Even darker times were in store, when
there was a Primate in the land, but when his authority was defied and
his person insulted. But as yet the darkest times that men had known
were the four years during which the sons of the English Church were
left as sheep without a shepherd.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Anselm.]
[Sidenote: Debt of England to foreigners.]
[Sidenote: The Burgundian saints.]
[Sidenote: Hugh of Avalon.]
[Sidenote: Anselm of Aosta.]
[Sidenote: His parentage.]
[Sidenote: Associations of his youth.]
The shepherd was at last to come, like his immediate predecessor, in
one sense from a distant land, in another sense from a land which was
only too near. The house of Bec, the house of Herlwin, was for the
second time to give a patriarch to the isle of Britain. It had given
us Lanfranc the statesman; it was now to give us Anselm the saint. We
may reckon it, not as the shame, but as the glory of our nation that
we have so often won strangers, and even conquerors, to become our
national leaders, and to take their place among the noblest worthies
of the soil. Alongside of the lawgiver from Denmark, of the deliverer
from France, we rank, as holding the same place among bishops which
they hold among kings and earls, the holy man from the Prætorian
Augusta.[1012] The annals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries are
thick set with the names of foreign prelates holding English sees; and
among them both Normandy and Lorraine, to say nothing of Pavia, had
sent us some whom we might well be glad to welcome. But the two whose
names shine out above them all, the two from whose names all thought
of their foreign birth passes away, the two whom we hail as our own by
adoption and love, came from a more distant realm, and a realm which
is well nigh forgotten. Hugh of Avalon and of Lincoln came from the
more favoured and famous district where the Imperial Burgundy rises to
the Alps and sinks again to the Rhone.[1013] Anselm of Aosta and of
Canterbury came from that deep valley which, after all changes, is
still Cisalpine Gaul. He came from that small outlying fragment of the
Middle Kingdom which has not risen to the destiny of Unterwalden and
Bern, of Lausanne and Geneva, but which has escaped the destiny of
Bresse and Bugey, of Chablais and Nizza, of royal Arles and princely
Orange, and of Hugh’s own home by the city of Gratian.[1014] The vale
of Aosta, still Burgundian in its speech and buildings, the last
remnant of the great Burgundian dominion of its lords, still gives a
title to princes of the house of its earliest and of its latest
Humbert. The father of Anselm, no less than the father of Lanfranc,
was of Lombard birth. But Gundulf had been fully adopted at Aosta, and
his son, born on Burgundian soil, son of a Burgundian mother of lofty,
perhaps of princely stock,[1015] must be reckoned as belonging to the
Burgundy in which he was born and bred rather than to the Italy which
in after days he visited as a stranger.[1016] There, in the last home
of old Gaulish freedom, in an Augusta named after the first
Augustus――an Augusta which we doubt whether to call Prætorian from the
conquerors or Salassian from the conquered――in the long valley fenced
in by the giant Alps on either side――at the foot of the pass where
local belief holds that Hannibal had crossed of old and where
Buonaparte was to cross in days to come――there where the square walls
of the Roman town rise almost untouched above the rushing Dora――where
the street still bearing the name of Anselm leads from the Roman gate
to the Roman arch of triumph, where the towers of Saint Gratus and
Saint Urse, fellows of kindred towers at Verona and at Lincoln, at
Schaffhausen and at Cambridge, rose fresh in all their squareness and
sternness when Anselm lay as a babe beneath their shadow――there, among
the sublimest works of nature and among some of the most striking
works of man, was born the teacher of Normandy, the shepherd of
England, the man who dived deeper than any man before him into the
most awful mysteries of the faith, but whom we have rather to deal
with as one who ranks by adoption among the truest worthies of
England, the man who stood forth as the champion of right against both
political and moral wrong in the days when both political and moral
wrong were at their darkest.
[Sidenote: Comparison of Lanfranc and Anselm.]
[Sidenote: Anselm not preferred in England by the Conqueror.]
[Sidenote: Various sides of Anselm’s character.]
I have already pointed out the contrast between the characters of
Lanfranc and Anselm, in recording one memorable discourse between
them, in which Anselm won Lanfranc over to a better mind in the matter
of our English Ælfheah.[1017] The calling and the work of the two men
were different; and the work of Anselm implied the earlier work of
Lanfranc. Lanfranc was, after all, in some sort a conqueror of the
English Church, and the character of a conqueror was one in which
Anselm could never have shown himself. Lanfranc was a statesman, one
whose policy could spread itself far beyond the bounds of this or that
kingdom or nation, but whose very policy compelled him not to let the
distinctions of kingdoms and nations slip out of his sight. To Anselm
we could almost fancy that such distinctions were of small account. He
was the servant of God and the friend of all God’s creatures; he
perhaps hardly stopped to think whether those whose souls and bodies
he was ever ready to help were Burgundian, Norman, or English. With
such a spirit as this, he could not have done Lanfranc’s work; and it
is worthy of remark that the Conqueror, who so greatly valued him,
seems never to have thought of him for any preferment in England.
Lanfranc had to carry out a policy, in some measure harsh and worldly,
but which, granting his own position and that of his master, could not
be avoided. Anselm fittingly came after him, at a time when national
distinctions and national wrongs were almost forgotten in the
universal reign of evil, to protest in the name of universal right,
and in so doing to protest against particular and national wrongs. He
would have been out of place in the first days of the Conquest; as a
stranger, though only as a stranger, he would have been out of place
in the days of our earlier freedom. When he did come, he was
thoroughly in place, as one who was before all things a preacher of
righteousness, but who could, when need called for it, put on the
mantle of the statesman and even that of the warrior. Like our own
Wulfstan, in many things his fellow, we find him the friend and
counsellor of men of a character most opposite to his own. And, as we
have seen Wulfstan, if not commanding, at least directing,
armies,[1018] so we shall see Anselm, if not waging war in his own
person, at least hallowing more than one camp by his presence. And we
can hardly blame him if, at some later stages of his career, he
allowed himself to be swayed by scruples which he had never thought of
at its beginning, if, in his zeal for eternal right, he allowed
himself to sin against the ancient laws and customs of England. When
England, Normandy, France, and the Empire, were as they all were in
his day, we can forgive him for looking on the Roman Bishop as the one
surviving embodiment of law and right, and for deeming that, when he
spake, it was as when a man listened to the oracles of God.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Anselm and Eadmer.]
[Sidenote: References to Eadmer in other writers.]
[Sidenote: Church’s Life of Anselm.]
The tale of the early life of Anselm has been handed down to us by a
loving companion, a man of our own nation, who was won in his youth by
the kind words of the foreign saint when he came to England as a
momentary visitor, and who in after times became the most faithful of
disciples through all the changes of his fortunes. It is one of the
marked features of the story that we know so little of Anselm, except
from his own writings and from the narrative of Eadmer. Our own
historians of the time speak of Anselm with the deepest reverence; but
they say little of him beside the broad facts which lie on the surface
of English history. Some of them directly refer to his special
biographer for fuller accounts.[1019] In telling his story I find
myself in the like case. I am tempted to refer once for all for the
acts of Anselm to his Life as written in our own day by a master both
of description and of comment.[1020] I could be well pleased to send
my readers elsewhere to study Anselm the monk and abbot, and to
concern myself only with his career as archbishop in our own land. But
the earlier and the later career of Anselm hang together, and he has
already made his appearance at more than one earlier stage of our own
story. I must therefore attempt some general notice, though at less
length than if the ground had not been thus forestalled, of the
primate who came to us from Aosta, as his predecessor did from Pavia,
and who, like his predecessor, made Bec a halting-place on the way to
Canterbury.
[Sidenote: Childhood of Anselm.]
[Sidenote: His youthful licence.]
[Sidenote: He leaves Aosta. 1057.]
[Sidenote: His sojourn at Avranches.]
[Sidenote: He becomes a monk at Bec. 1060.]
[Sidenote: Elected prior. 1063.]
In the life of Anselm a childhood and a manhood of eminent holiness
are parted by a short time of youthful licence. The little child in
his dream climbed his native mountains to seek for the palace of God
on a Christian Olympos. He reported the idleness of the handmaids of
his Lord; he sat at the feet of his Lord; he was refreshed by the
steward of the divine household with a meal of the purest bread.[1021]
The scholarly boy was so eager for the monastic life that he prayed
for some sickness that might drive him into the cloister.[1022] But
the youth for a while cast aside his piety; he cast aside his
learning; he gave himself to the thoughts and sports of the world; he
even yielded to those temptations of the flesh which Wulfstan had
withstood in the midst of his military exercises,[1023] and which
Thomas withstood in the midst of his worldly business.[1024] But the
love of his tender and pious mother kept him from wholly falling away.
The yearning for a monastic life came upon him again, though his
wishes were greatly opposed by his father. At last, in his
twenty-fourth year, Anselm left his own land. After three years’
sojourn in Burgundy and France, he reached Normandy, and, in the steps
of Lanfranc, first took up his abode at Avranches.[1025] But Lanfranc
was now at Bec. Thither Anselm, fully bent on the monastic calling,
followed the great scholar. He had doubted for a while between Bec and
Clugny. We shall hardly think the worse of him for his frank
confession of human feelings. He doubted, because at Clugny his human
learning would be of no use, while at Bec it would be overshadowed by
that of Lanfranc.[1026] In the end, by the advice of Lanfranc himself
and of Archbishop Maurilius, he became a monk of Bec, and, when
Lanfranc became Abbot of Saint Stephen’s, Anselm succeeded him in the
office of prior.[1027]
[Sidenote: Stories of him as prior.]
[Sidenote: Elected Abbot. 1078.]
This first preferment Anselm seems to have taken willingly. A crowd of
beautiful stories, setting forth his faith towards God and his
kindliness towards all men, belong to this part of his career, the
time when he was specially employed in writing his theological works.
We admire the mixture of wisdom and kindness with which he reproved
the abbot of another house who complained that the boys who were
entrusted to his teaching got more and more unruly, even though they
were whipped day and night.[1028] We are tempted to feel a slight
grudge when he counsels a knight who seems to have been leading a good
and devout life in the world to embrace the monastic calling.[1029]
Much as that age needed men like Anselm, it still more needed men like
Gulbert of Hugleville and Helias of La Flèche. But we note with some
interest the comment of Eadmer, so curiously illustrating the common
rivalry between one monastery and another. In such cases Anselm did
not counsel profession at Bec rather than in any other house, and this
particular convert took the cowl at Marmoutiers. At last, on the death
of Herlwin, the unanimous choice of the convent called him to the
place of abbot. His deep reluctance to accept so great a charge was
overcome only by the express command of Archbishop Maurilius, who, on
his election to the priorship, had bidden him by virtue of holy
obedience to accept both that and any higher preferment which might
come in his way.[1030] The election of Anselm to the abbacy marks a
stage in our story. It was in his character of abbot that he was first
brought into relations with England; in that character he paid his
first visit to the land which was presently to make him her own.
[Sidenote: Bec under Anselm.]
[Sidenote: His widespread fame.]
[Sidenote: His correspondence.]
[Sidenote: Intercourse between Bec and England.]
The fame of the new Abbot of Bec and of his house, great already, now
grew still greater. Learning had shone at Bec ever since Lanfranc came
thither; but hitherto it had shone only in the second rank. It now
took the chief seat in the person of Abbot Anselm. He was sought by
men from all parts as a friend, a teacher, a spiritual adviser. Of the
open-handed hospitality of Bec it was not, we are told, for Norman
neighbours to speak; those might speak who had found their way thither
from the distant lands of Burgundy and Spain.[1031] The whole Latin
world drank in with eagerness the teaching of Anselm.[1032] Scholars
of all lands came to sit at his feet. Noble ladies in their widowhood
sought his neighbourhood and spiritual direction, and received the
honourable title of mothers of the house.[1033] Like all the saints
and scholars of his day, he had a crowd of correspondents of all
classes; amongst them we see Countess Ida of Boulogne and the
Conqueror’s renowned daughter Adela.[1034] And throughout his life and
letters we see constant signs of the daily intercourse which, as
naturally followed on the circumstances of the time, was ever going on
between Normandy and England. The endless going to and fro between the
two countries strikes us at every step.[1035] There was an interchange
of men; if many Normans found their way to England, some Englishmen
found their way to Normandy. Bec had already begun to give bishops to
England. Lanfranc had placed two monks of his old house in the
episcopal chair of Rochester.[1036] The second of them, the famous
Gundulf, had been, when at Bec, the familiar friend of Anselm, who
spoke little himself, but who listened to the great teacher, and wept
at his touching words.[1037] On the other hand, in the house of Bec
itself there were monks who were English of the Old-English stock,
monks whom Lanfranc thought fit to call back to their own land and to
the monastery of which he was the spiritual father.[1038]
[Sidenote: Lands of Bec in England.]
[Sidenote: The dependent priory of Clare. 1090.]
Anselm had thus many ties of friendship and kindly association with
England, even before he had any official connexion with the land or
its inhabitants. And a strictly official connexion began long before
he became archbishop. The Abbot of Bec had both temporal possessions
and spiritual duties within our island. He was the lord of English
estates and the spiritual father of brethren settled on English soil.
The house of Bec appears in four places in Domesday as holder of lands
in England; but one manor only was held in chief of the king. The
church of Saint Mary of Bec held the lordship of Deverel in Wiltshire,
once the possession of Brihtric, whether the son of Ælfgar or any less
famous bearer of the name. This had been the gift of Queen Matilda,
and it is worth noting that the value of the land had lessened in the
few years between her death and the taking of the Survey.[1039] A
smaller estate at Swinecombe in Oxfordshire, held of Miles Crispin,
was more lucky; it had grown in value by one third.[1040] In Surrey
the house held lands at Tooting and Streatham, the gift of Richard of
Clare or of Tunbridge, him of whom we have so often heard. The
possessions of Bec at Tooting, which had sunk to one fifth of their
ancient value at the time of their grant to the abbey, had risen again
to the value at which they were rated in the days of King
Eadward.[1041] The business arising out of these lands, all seemingly
held in demesne, with a mill, churls, slaves, and other dependents,
must have called for some care on the part of the abbot or of those
whom he employed for the purpose. And it would seem that, on the
whole, the monastic body had been a careful husband of its English
estates. In after times also Bec became the head of several alien
priories in England; but one only of these can be carried back with
certainty to Anselm’s day. This was the priory of Clare in Suffolk,
afterwards moved to Stoke, which was founded as a cell to Bec while
Anselm was abbot.[1042] It was the gift of Gilbert of Clare, brother
of Richard the other benefactor of the house, a house which seems to
have had special attractions for the whole family of Count Gilbert.
[Sidenote: Law-suits.]
[Sidenote: Anselm’s desire to do justice.]
[Sidenote: His first visit to England. 1078.]
[Sidenote: His friendship with the monks of Christ Church.]
[Sidenote: Eadmer.]
Anselm was thus a land-owner on both sides of the sea, and, little as
he loved temporal business, he could not wholly escape it. No man, no
society of men, in either the Normandy or the England of those days,
could hope to keep clear of law-suits. The house of Herlwin, new as it
was and holy as it was, seems to have been entangled in not a few.
Anselm’s chief wish was that in these disputes justice should be done
to all concerned. There were among the monks of Bec, as among the
monks of other houses, men who knew the law and who were skilful in
legal pleadings. The Abbot had sometimes to charge them to make no
unfair use of their skill, and not to strive to win any advantage for
the house but such as was strictly just.[1043] Otherwise, as far as he
could, he entrusted mere worldly affairs――the serving of tables――to
others.[1044] Yet he could not avoid journeys beyond sea on behalf of
the house. He was thus more than once compelled to visit England. He
crossed the sea in the first year of his appointment as abbot. He came
to Canterbury; he was received with mickle worship by Lanfranc and the
monks of Christ Church.[1045] The first touch of English soil seems to
have changed the Burgundian saint, the Norman abbot, into an
Englishman and an English patriot. It was now that he made the
memorable discourse in which he showed that English Ælfheah was a true
martyr.[1046] The Abbot of Bec did not scorn to be admitted into the
brotherhood of the monks of Christ Church, and to dwell with them as
one of themselves.[1047] It was the time when Lanfranc was doing his
work of reform among them,[1048] a work which was doubtless helped by
the sojourn and counsel of Anselm. With the more learned among them he
lived familiarly, putting and answering questions, both in profane and
sacred lore.[1049] And among them he made one friend, English by blood
and name, whose memory is for ever entwined with his own. It was now
that Eadmer, then a young monk of the house, won his deep regard, and
attached himself for ever to the master whose acts he was in after
times to record.[1050]
[Sidenote: Anselm’s general popularity in England.]
[Sidenote: His preaching.]
[Sidenote: His love for England.]
[Sidenote: His alleged miracles.]
[Sidenote: His friendship with the Conqueror;]
[Sidenote: with Earl Hugh.]
[Sidenote: Hugh’s changes at Chester.]
But it was not only in the church which was one day to be his own, or
among men of his own order only, that Anselm made friends in England.
He made a kind of progress through the land, being welcomed
everywhere, as well in the courts of nobles as in the houses of monks,
nuns, and canons.[1051] Everywhere he scattered the good seed of his
teaching, speaking to all according to their several callings, to men
and women, married and unmarried, monks, clerks, laymen, making
himself, as far as was lawful, all things to all men.[1052] Scholar
and theologian as Anselm was, his teaching was specially popular; he
did not affect the grand style, but dealt largely in parables and
instances which were easy to be understood.[1053] The laity therefore
flocked eagerly to hear him, and every man rejoiced who could win the
privilege of personal speech with the new apostle.[1054] The men of
that age, stained as many of them were with great crimes――perhaps all
the more because their crimes were of a kind which they could not help
feeling to be crimes――commonly kept enough of conscience and good
feeling to admire in others the virtues which they failed to practise
themselves. William Rufus himself had moments when goodness awed him.
It was only a few exceptional monsters like the fiend of Bellême whom
no such feelings ever touched. Anselm became the idol of all the
inhabitants of England, without distinction of age or sex, of rank or
race. The land became to him yet another home, a home which he loved
to visit, and where he was ever welcome.[1055] Men sought to him for
the cure of bodily as well as spiritual diseases; and we read of not a
few cases of healing in which he was deemed to be the agent, cases in
which modern times will most likely see the strong exercise of that
power which, from one point of view, is called imagination, and from
another faith.[1056] The highest in estate and power were the most
eager of all to humble themselves before him. We have seen how the
elder William, ever mild to good men, was specially mild to Anselm,
how he craved his presence on his death-bed, and how Anselm, unable to
help his master in life, was among those who did the last honours to
him in death.[1057] We are told that there was not an earl or countess
or great person of any kind in England, who did not seek the
friendship of Anselm, who did not deem that his or her spiritual state
was the worse if any opportunity had been lost of doing honour or
service to the Abbot of Bec.[1058] Like some other saints of his own
and of other times, he drew to himself the special regard of some
whose characters were most unlike his own. Earl Hugh of Chester,
debauched, greedy, reckless, and cruel, beyond the average of the
time, is recorded as being a special friend of the holy man.[1059] He
who rebuked kings doubtless rebuked earls also; but it would have been
a better sign of reformation, if Hugh, under the teaching of Anselm,
had learned to spare the eyes either of brother nobles or of British
captives, than if he was merely led to place monks instead of canons
at Saint Werburh’s, and in the end to take the cowl among them
himself.
[Sidenote: Feeling as to the vacancy of the archbishopric. 1092.]
[Sidenote: Vacancy of Lincoln.]
[Sidenote: Anselm looked to as the coming archbishop.]
But the planting of monks at Saint Werburh’s had no small effect on
the destiny of Anselm and of England. In the course of the year which
saw the annexation of Cumberland men began to be thoroughly wearied of
the long vacancy of the archbishopric. It may be that the great
gathering at Lincoln had brought home to every mind the great wrong
under which the Church was suffering. The bishops of the land had come
together to a great ecclesiastical rite; but they had come together as
a body without a head. And they had parted under circumstances which
made the state of things even worse than it had been when they met.
The death of Remigius had handed over another bishopric to the
wardship of Flambard. The land from the Thames to the Humber, the
great diocese which took in nine shires, was to be left without a
shepherd as long as Rufus and Flambard should think good. That is, it
was to be left till some one among the King’s servants should be ready
to do by Lincoln as Herbert Losinga had done by Thetford. Men began to
say among themselves that such unlaw as this could not go on for ever;
the land could not abide without a chief pastor; an archbishop must
soon come somehow, whether the King and Flambard willed it or not. The
feeling was universal; and with it another feeling was almost equally
universal; when the archbishop should come, he could come only in the
shape of the man who was of all men most worthy of the office, the man
whom all England knew and loved as if his whole life had been spent
within her seas, the holy Abbot of Bec.[1060] That such was the
general feeling in England soon became known out of England; it became
known at Bec as at other places; it was not hidden from the Abbot of
Bec himself.
[Sidenote: Earl Hugh seeks help from Anselm in his reforms. 1092.]
[Sidenote: Anselm refuses to go.]
[Sidenote: His motives.]
[Sidenote: Hugh’s sickness and second message.]
[Sidenote: The third message.]
At the time which we have now reached Earl Hugh was planning his
supposed reforms at Saint Werburh’s. Designing to fill the minster
with monks, he would have his monks from the place where the monastic
life was most perfectly practised; the men who were to kindle a new
light at Chester must come from Bec.[1061] It was in the end from Bec
that the first abbot Richard and his brethren came to wage that strife
which we are told was so specially hard-fought in that region.[1062]
But the founder further wished the work to be done under the eye of
the Abbot of Bec himself; so, trusting in his old friendship, Earl
Hugh prayed Anselm to come to him. His prayer was backed by that of
other nobles of England;[1063] the monks of Bec too deemed that either
the affairs of Saint Werburh’s or some other business of the monastery
called for their abbot’s presence in England.[1064] But Anselm at
first steadily refused to go; the general rumour had reached his own
ears; he had been told that, if he went to England, he would certainly
become Archbishop of Canterbury. He shrank from the acceptance of such
an office; he shrank yet more from doing anything which might even
have the look of seeking for such an office. It might be a question of
casuistry whether the command of Maurilius to accept any preferment
that might be offered could have any force beyond the life and the
province of Maurilius; yet that command may have made Anselm yet more
determined to keep out of the way of all danger of having the see of
Canterbury offered to him. He refused to go to England, when it was
possible that his object in going might be cruelly misconstrued.[1065]
Another message came, announcing that Earl Hugh was smitten with
grievous sickness, and needed the spiritual help of his friend.
Moreover Anselm need not be afraid; there was nothing in the rumours
which he had heard; he stood in no danger of the archbishopric.[1066]
In this Hugh most likely spoke the truth. Others had brought
themselves to believe that there must soon be an archbishop, and that
that archbishop must be Anselm. But they had no ground for thinking
that anything of the kind would happen, except that it was the best
thing that could happen. The Earl of Chester was as likely as any man
except Flambard to know the King’s real mind; and what followed makes
it plain that as yet Rufus had no thought of filling the archbishopric
at all. Still Anselm would not go till a third message from the Earl
appealed to another motive. It would not be for the soul’s health of
Anselm himself if he stayed away when his friend so deeply needed his
help.[1067] To this argument Anselm yielded; for the sake of
friendship and of his friend’s spiritual welfare, he would go, let men
say what they would about his motives for going.[1068]
[Sidenote: He is bidden to go by his monks.]
[Sidenote: Anselm goes to England.]
But the invitation of Earl Hugh was not Anselm’s only motive for his
journey. Another cause was added which a little startles us. The
business of the abbey in England, business to be done with the King,
still called for the abbot’s presence there. The monks sought to have
the royal exactions on their English lands made less heavy.[1069] At
this moment Anselm was not at Bec; he was spending some days at
Boulogne with his friend and correspondent Countess Ida.[1070] While
there, he received a message from Bec, bidding him, by virtue of the
law of obedience, not to come back to the abbey till he had gone into
England and looked after the matters about which he was needed
there.[1071] Such a message as this from monks to their abbot sounds
to us like a reversal of all monastic order; but it seems to have been
held that, while each monk undoubtedly owed obedience to the abbot,
the abbot himself owed obedience to the general vote of the convent.
To these two influences, the law of obedience and care for Earl Hugh’s
soul, Anselm at last yielded. He set sail from Boulogne or Whitsand,
and landed at Dover. He was now within what was presently to be his
own province, his own diocese; and that province he was not again to
leave till he sought shelter on the mainland in the character of
archbishop and confessor.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Anselm at Canterbury. September 8, 1092.]
[Sidenote: His first interview with Rufus.]
[Sidenote: Anselm’s rebuke of the King.]
[Sidenote: Settlement of the affairs of Bec.]
The immediate business of Anselm led him to Chester, and to the place,
wherever it was, where the King was to be found. We are told that he
made the best of his way to his sick friend,[1072] who was so eager
for Anselm’s coming that he despised all other spiritual help.[1073]
But it is plain that he tarried on the road to see the King. From
Dover his first stage was Canterbury. There he was alarmed by the
welcome given him by a crowd of monks and laymen who hailed him as
their future archbishop. It was a high festival, the Nativity of our
Lady; but Anselm, wishing to give no encouragement to such greetings
as he had just received, declined to officiate at the celebration of
the feast. He tarried but one night in the city, and left it early the
next morning.[1074] He then went to the King. The reception which he
met with showed that Rufus must have been for the moment in one of his
better moods. Anselm indeed was a chosen friend of his father, and he
had given him no personal offence. As soon as the approach of the
Abbot of Bec was announced, the King arose, met him at the door,
exchanged the kiss of peace, and led him by the hand to his
seat.[1075] A friendly discourse followed. Perhaps the very
friendliness of William’s greeting brought it more fully home to
Anselm’s mind that it would be a failure of duty on his own part if he
spoke only of the worldly affairs of his abbey. He must seize the
moment to give a word of warning to a sinner whose evil deeds were so
black, and who disgraced at the same time so lofty an office and such
high natural gifts. Anselm asked that all others might withdraw; he
wished for a private interview with the King. The affairs of the house
of Bec were, for the moment at least, passed by; the welfare of the
kingdom of England, and the soul’s health of its king, were objects
which came first. Anselm told Rufus in plain words that the men of his
kingdom, both secretly and openly, daily said things of him which in
no way became his kingly office.[1076] From later appeals of Anselm to
the conscience of Rufus, we may conceive that this general description
took in at once the special wrongs done to the Church, the general
abuses of William’s government, and the personal excesses of William’s
own life. Anselm was not the man to hold his peace on any one of those
three subjects; but we have no details of Anselm’s discourse from his
own biographer, nor does he give us any notice of the way in which
William received his rebuke.[1077] Yet it would seem that the milder
mood of the Red King had not wholly passed away. If Anselm had been
thrust aside with any violent or sarcastic answer, it would surely
have passed into one of the stock anecdotes of the reign. Our only
other description of the scene paints Rufus as held back from any
disrespectful treatment of Anselm by a lingering reverence for the
friend of his parents. He turned the matter off with a laugh. He could
not hinder what men chose to say of him; but so holy a man as Anselm
ought not to believe such stories.[1078] It is not even clear whether
Anselm brought himself to speak at all on the particular business
which had brought him to the King’s presence. King and Abbot parted;
it would seem that nothing was done about the affairs of Bec for the
present; but we may gather that, at some later time, the lands of the
monastery were relieved from the burthens of which they complained.[1079]
[Sidenote: Anselm at Chester.]
[Sidenote: The King refuses him leave to go back. February, 1093.]
Anselm now went on to Chester, where he found his friend Earl Hugh
restored to health. But the change in the foundation at Saint
Werburh’s still needed his presence, and the special affairs of his
own house had also to be looked to. Between these two sets of affairs,
Anselm was kept in England for five months. He then wished to go back
to Normandy; but the King’s leave, it seems, was needed, and the
King’s leave was refused.[1080]
[Sidenote: William’s feeling towards Anselm.]
[Sidenote: Christmas Assembly, 1092-1093.]
[Sidenote: The vacancy discussed by the Witan.]
[Sidenote: Petition of the Assembly to the King.]
[Sidenote: Prayers for the appointment of an archbishop.]
[Sidenote: Anselm draws up a form of prayer.]
This refusal is worth notice. It does not seem to have been done in
enmity; at least it was not followed by any kind of further
wrong-doing on the King’s part towards Anselm. It really looks as if
William had, not indeed any fixed purpose of appointing Anselm to the
archbishopric, but a kind of feeling that he might be driven to
appoint him, a feeling that things might come to a stage in which he
could not help naming some archbishop, and that, if it came to that
stage, he could not help naming Anselm. It is plain from what follows
that the thought of Anselm as a possible archbishop was in the King’s
mind as well as in the minds of others. But certainly no offer or hint
was at this stage made by William, nor was anything said to Anselm
about the matter by any one else.[1081] Men no doubt knew Anselm’s
feelings, and avoided the subject. But at one point during these five
months the vacancy of the archbishopric was brought very strongly
before Anselm’s mind, though not in a way which suggested his own
appointment rather than that of anybody else. When the Midwinter Gemót
of this year was held, the long vacancy, and the evils which flowed
from it, became a matter of discussion among the assembled Witan. But
they did not venture to attempt any election, or even to make any
suggestion of their own; they did not even make any direct petition to
the King to put an end to the vacancy. A resolution was passed――our
contemporary guide doubted whether future ages would believe the
fact――that the King should be humbly petitioned to allow prayers to be
put up throughout the churches of England craving that God would by
his inspiration move the King’s heart to put an end to the wrongs of
his head church and of all his other churches by the appointment of a
worthy chief pastor.[1082] We thus see that the power of ending or
prolonging the vacancy is acknowledged to rest only with the King; it
is not for the Witan to constrain, but only for God to guide, the
royal will. But we further see that the right of ordaining religious
ceremonies is held to rest with the King and his Witan, just as it had
rested in the days of Cnut.[1083] The unanimous petition of the
Assembly was laid before the King. He was somewhat angry, but he took
no violent step. He agreed to the matter of the address, but in a
scornful shape. “Pray as you will; I shall do as I think good; no
man’s prayers will do anything to shake my will.”[1084] To draw up a
proper form of prayer was the natural business of the bishops; and
they had among them one specially skilled in such matters in the
person of Osmund of Salisbury. But they all agreed to consult the
Abbot of Bec, and to ask him to draw up a prayer fitted for the
purpose. Anselm, after much pressing, agreed; he drew up the prayer;
it was laid before the Assembly, and his work was approved by
all.[1085] The Gemót broke up, and prayers were offered throughout
England, according to Anselm’s model, for the appointment of an
archbishop, a prayer which on most lips doubtless meant the
appointment of Anselm himself.[1086]
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The year 1093.]
[Sidenote: William’s sickness at Alvestone.]
[Sidenote: Discourse about Anselm before the King.]
[Sidenote: The King’s mockery.]
[Sidenote: He falls sick and is moved to Gloucester.]
[Sidenote: Ash Wednesday, March 2, 1093.]
Before the Assembly broke up, a memorable year had begun. It is a year
crowded with events, with the deaths of memorable men, with one death
above all which led to most important results on the relations between
the two great parts of the isle of Britain. With these events I shall
deal in another chapter; we have now mainly to trace the
ecclesiastical character of the year as the greatest of all stages in
the career of Anselm. The Assembly had doubtless been held at
Gloucester, and, after the session was over, the King tarried in the
neighbourhood, at the royal house of Alvestone, once a lordship of
Earl Harold.[1087] There he was smitten with a heavy sickness. The
tale has a legendary sound; yet there is nothing really incredible in
the story that he fell sick directly after he had been guilty of a
mocking speech about Anselm. Some nobles were with the King at
Alvestone, and one of them spoke of the virtues of the Abbot of Bec.
He was a man who loved God only, and sought for none of the things of
this world. The King says in mockery, “Not for the archbishopric of
Canterbury?” The remark at least shows that Anselm and the
archbishopric went together in the King’s thoughts as well as in the
thoughts of other men.[1088] The lord who had spoken answered that, in
his belief and in that of many others, the archbishopric was the very
thing which Anselm least wished for.[1089] The King laughed again, and
said that, if Anselm had any hope of the archbishopric, he would clap
his hands and stamp with his feet, and run into the King’s arms. But
he added, “By the face of Lucca, he and every other man who seeks the
archbishopric may this time give way to me; for I will be archbishop
myself.”[1090] He repeated the jest several times. Presently sickness
came upon him, and, in a few hours, he took to his bed. He was carried
in haste from Alvestone to the neighbouring city, where he could
doubtless find better quarters and attendance.[1091] He lay sick
during the whole of Lent; but, unless his sickness began somewhat
earlier, the whole of the events with which we have to deal must have
been crowded into the first few days of the penitential season. At all
events, during the first week of Lent, William Rufus was lying at
Gloucester, sick of a sickness which both himself and others deemed to
be unto death.[1092]
[Sidenote: Repentance of Rufus.]
[Sidenote: Advice of the prelates and nobles.]
[Sidenote: Anselm sent for.]
[Sidenote: Anselm and Rufus.]
[Sidenote: Rufus promises amendment.]
[Sidenote: His proclamation.]
[Sidenote: General satisfaction.]
The heart of the Red King was not yet wholly hardened; with sickness
came repentance. Believing himself to be at the gates of the next
world, his conscience awoke, and he saw in their true light the deeds
which he had been so long doing in this world. He no longer jested at
his own crimes and vices; he bemoaned them and began to think of
amendment. The great men of the realm, bishops, abbots, and lay
nobles, pressed around his sick bed, looking for his speedy death, and
urging him to make what atonement he could for his misdeeds, while he
yet lived. Let him throw open his prisons; let him set free his
captives; let him loose those who were in chains; let him forgive his
debtors――it is again assumed that a debt to the Crown must be a
wrongful debt――let him provide pastors for the churches which he holds
in his hands; above all, let him set free the head church of all, the
church of Canterbury, whose bondage was the most crying wrong of his
kingdom.[1093] All this they pressed, each to the best of his power,
on the no longer unwilling mind of the King. It bethought them
moreover that there was one not far off, who was more skilled than any
of them in healing the diseases of the soul, and whose words would
strike deeper into the heart of the penitent than the words of any
other. The Abbot of Bec was still in England; he was even, knowing
nothing of what was going on, tarrying at no great distance from
Gloucester.[1094] A messenger was sent, bidding him come with all
speed; the King was dying, and needed his spiritual help before all
was over. Anselm came at once; he asked what had passed between the
sick man and his directors, and he fully approved of all the counsel
that they had given to the repentant sinner.[1095] The duties of
confession, of amendment, of reparation, the full and speedy carrying
out of all that his advisers had pressed upon him, was the only means,
the only hope. By the general voice of all, Anselm was bidden to
undertake the duty of making yet another exhortation to the royal
penitent. Anselm spoke, and William hearkened. He more than hearkened;
he answered, and for the moment he acted. He accepted all that Anselm
told him; he promised to amend his ways, to rule his kingdom in
mildness and righteousness. To this he pledged his faith; he made the
bishops his sureties, and bade them renew the promise in his name to
God before the altar.[1096] More practical still, a proclamation was
put forth under the royal seal, promising to the people, in the old
form, good laws, strict heed to right, strict examination into wrong.
The vacant churches should be filled, and their revenues should be
restored to them. The King would no longer sell them or set them to
farm. All prisoners should be set free; all debts to the crown should
be forgiven; all offences against the King should be pardoned, and all
suits begun in the King’s name stopped.[1097] Great was the joy
through the land; a burst of loyal thankfulness was in every heart and
on every mouth. The rule of King William was henceforth to be as the
rule of the best of the kings who had gone before him. Thanksgivings
went up to God through the whole land, and earnest prayers for the
welfare of so great and so good a king.[1098]
[Sidenote: Beginnings of reform.]
[Sidenote: He grants the bishopric of Lincoln to Robert Bloet.]
This was the second time that the people of England had greedily
swallowed the promises of the Red King. He had already deceived them
once; but kings are easily trusted, and the awful circumstances under
which reform was now promised might well lead men to believe that the
promise was sincere. Sincere for the moment it doubtless was; nor did
the proclamation remain altogether a dead letter. The reforms were
actually begun; some at least of the prisoners were set free. William
also now made grants to some monasteries,[1099] and, what was more
important than all, he filled the vacant bishoprics. The fame of one
of the two appointments so fills the pages of our guides that we might
easily forget that it was now that the staff of Remigius was given to
Robert Bloet.[1100] We have heard of him already as an old servant of
William the Great, and as trusted by him with the weighty letter which
ruled the succession of the crown on behalf of William the Red.[1101]
He was now the King’s Chancellor. He bears a doubtful character; he
was not a scholar, but he was a man skilful in all worldly business;
he was not a saint, but he was perhaps not the extreme sinner which
some have painted him.[1102] His consecration was put off for nearly a
year; and we shall meet him again in the midst of a striking and busy
scene when the next year has begun. For the present we need only
remember that two bishops, and not one only, were invested, according
to the ancient use of England, by the royal hand at the bedside of
William Rufus.
[Sidenote: March 6, 1093.]
[Sidenote: Rufus names Anselm to the archbishopric.]
[Sidenote: General delight.]
[Sidenote: Unwillingness of Anselm.]
[Sidenote: Arguments of the bishops.]
We may take for granted that it took no such struggle to change the
King’s Chancellor into the Bishop-elect of Lincoln as it took
to change the man on whom all eyes were now fixed into an
Archbishop-elect of Canterbury. It was now a Sunday, the first Sunday
in Lent; a gathering of bishops and other chief men stood around the
King who was believed to be dying. He had solemnly repented; he must
now make restitution. The best men among those who stood around him
pressed yet more strongly on his mind the duty of at once filling the
metropolitan see. The sick man answered that such was his purpose.
They asked whom he deemed worthy of such a post; none dared suggest
any name; the choice rested wholly with the royal will.[1103] The King
made an effort; he sat up in his bed; he pointed out the Abbot of Bec
among those who filled the room, and spake the words; “I choose this
holy man Anselm.”[1104] The feeling which now bids men to listen in
silence to the official utterances of royal lips was then unheard of;
even the fear of danger to the sick man yielded to the universal joy;
a loud shout of applause rang through the chamber which was soon, as
men deemed, to be the chamber of death. One man alone joined not in
the shout; one man grew pale and trembled in every limb. The moment so
long dreaded had at last come; the burthen from which he shrank was at
last to be forced on the shoulders of the struggling abbot. For in the
case of Anselm the struggle was no metaphor. He was dragged to the
King’s bedside to receive the investiture[1105]――no thought of the
elective rights of the monks of distant Christ Church seems to have
come into the head of any man. Pouring out reasons against his own
appointment, Anselm withstood by main force all efforts to drag him
nearer to the King. The bishops at last succeeded in drawing him apart
from the crowd, and began to argue with him more quietly.[1106] They
warned him not to withstand the will of God, or to refuse the work to
which he was called. He saw that Christianity had almost died out in
England; everything had fallen into confusion; every abomination was
rife. One bolder voice――was it the voice of English Wulfstan or of
Norman Gundulf?――added words such as are not often uttered in the
chamber of a king, and which even then perhaps were not meant to reach
kingly ears. “By the tyranny of that man”[1107]――pointing to the sick
king on his bed――“we and the churches which we ought to rule have
fallen into danger of eternal death; wilt thou, when thou canst help
us, scorn our petition?” The appeal went on; Anselm was told how the
church of Canterbury, in whose oppression all were oppressed, called
to him to raise up her and them; could he, casting aside all thought
for her freedom, all thought for the help of his brethren, refuse to
share their work, and seek only his own ease? Anselm pleaded at
length; he was old; he was unused to worldly affairs. He prayed to be
allowed to abide in the peaceful calling which he loved. The bishops
all the more called on him to take the rule over them which was
offered to him; let him guide them in the way of God; let him pray to
God for them, and they would manage all worldly affairs for him.[1108]
He then pleaded that he was the subject of another realm;[1109] he
owed obedience to his own prince, to his own archbishop; he could not
cast off his duty to them without their leave; nay, he could not,
without the consent of his own monks, cast off the duties which he
owed to them. The bishops told him that the consent of all concerned
would be easily gained. He protested that all that they did, all that
they purposed, was nought.[1110]
[Sidenote: Anselm dragged to the King’s bedside.]
[Sidenote: Pleadings of the King.]
[Sidenote: Further pleadings of the bishops]
[Sidenote: and of his own monks.]
[Sidenote: He is invested by main force.]
[Sidenote: He is installed in the church.]
The bishops had certainly the better in the argument; they had also
the better in the physical struggle; for they now dragged Anselm close
to the King’s bedside. They set forth to Rufus what they called the
obstinacy of the Abbot;[1111] it was for the King to try what his
personal authority could do. The sick man, lately so proud and
scornful, was stirred even to tears; he made a speech far longer than
his wont, but which seems to carry with it the stamp of genuineness.
He had raised himself to speak his formal choice with a voice of
authority; he now spoke, in plaintive and beseeching words, in the ear
of the holy man beside him. In the mind of Rufus at that moment it was
his own personal salvation that was at stake. “O Anselm,” he
whispered, “why do you condemn me to eternal torments? Remember, I
pray you, the faithful friendship which my father and my mother had to
you and which you had to them; by that friendship I adjure you not to
let their son perish both in body and soul. For I am sure that I shall
perish if I die while I still have the archbishopric in my
hands.[1112] Help me then, help me, lord and father; take the
bishopric for the holding of which I am already greatly confounded,
and fear that I shall be confounded for ever.” Still Anselm drew back
and excused himself. Then the bishops again took up their parable in a
stronger tone. What madness had possessed him? He was harassing the
King, almost killing him; his last moments were embittered by Anselm’s
obstinacy.[1113] They gave him to know that whatever disturbances,
oppressions, and crimes, might hereafter disturb England would all lie
at his door, if he did not stop them that day by taking on him the
pastoral care. Still――so he himself witnessed afterwards――wishing
rather, if it were God’s will, to die than to take on him the
archbishopric, he turned to two of his own monks who had come with
him, Eustace and Baldwin of Tournay, and asked them to help him.[1114]
Baldwin answered, “If it be the will of God that it shall be so, who
are we that we should withstand the will of God?” His words were
followed by a flood of tears, his tears by a gush of blood from his
nostrils. Anselm, surely half-smiling, said, “Alas, how soon is your
staff broken.” The King then, seeing that nothing was gained, bade the
bishops fall at Anselm’s feet and implore him to take the see. A like
scene had been gone through at Bec when it was first sought to raise
Anselm to the abbacy.[1115] The bishops fell at his feet, and
implored; Anselm fell at their feet, and implored back again. There
was nothing to be done save the last shift of, so to speak, investing
him with the bishopric by physical force. A cry was raised for a
pastoral staff; the staff was brought, and was placed in the sick
king’s hand.[1116] The bishops seized the right arm of Anselm; some
pushed; some pulled; he was forced close up to the Kings bed. The King
held out the staff; the Abbot, though his arm was stretched out
against his will, held his hand firmly clenched. The bishops strove to
force open his fingers, till he shrieked with the pain. After much
striving, they managed to raise his forefinger, to place the staff
between that one finger and his still closed hand, and to keep it
there with their own hands.[1117] This piece of sheer violence was
held to be a lawful investiture. The assembled crowd――we are still in
the sick king’s room――began to shout “Long live the Bishop.” The
bishops and clergy began to sing _Te Deum_ with a loud voice.[1118]
Then the bishops, abbots, and nobles, seized Anselm, and carried
rather than led him into a neighbouring church――was it the great
minster of Ealdred or its successor growing up under the hands of
Serlo?[1119]――while he still refused and struggled and protested that
all that they did went for nothing.[1120] A looker-on, Anselm himself
says, might have doubted whether a crowd in their right mind were
dragging a single madman, or whether a crowd of madmen were dragging a
single man who kept his right mind.[1121] Anyhow they reached the
church and there went through the ceremonies which were usual on such
occasions.[1122] Anselm was now deemed to have become, however much
against his own will, Archbishop-elect of Canterbury.
[Sidenote: Anselm’s renewed protest.]
[Sidenote: His parable to the prelates and nobles.]
[Sidenote: Its special fitness in England.]
[Sidenote: The King orders the restitution of the lands of the see.]
From the church Anselm went back to the King’s chamber. He there
renewed his protest against the appointment, but he renewed it in the
form of a prophecy. “My lord the King, I tell you that you will not
die of this sickness; I would therefore have you know how easily you
can undo what has been this day done with regard to me, as I never
agreed, nor do I agree, that it shall be held valid.”[1123] He then
left the sick room, and spoke to the bishops and nobles in some other
place, perhaps the hall of the castle. Whether formally summoned as
such or not, they were practically a Gemót of the realm.[1124] Anselm
spoke to them in a parable, founded on the apostolic figure which
speaks of the Church as God’s husbandry.[1125] In England the plough
of the Church ought to be drawn by two chief oxen of equal strength,
each pulling with the same good will. These were the King and the
Archbishop of Canterbury, one ruling by worldly justice and dominion,
the other by divine doctrine and teaching. So, he implies, it had
been in the days of William the Great and of Lanfranc his
yoke-fellow.[1126] The figure is one which will bear much study. It is
perhaps in England alone that it could have been used. In the highest
rank of all, used to the loftier metaphors of the two great lights of
heaven and the two swords on earth, figures drawn from ploughs and
oxen might have seemed unworthy of the supreme majesty of the Roman
Emperor and the Roman Pontiff. In other lands the metaphor would have
failed from another side. The Primate of Rheims or of Rouen could
hardly be spoken of as in the same sort the yoke-fellow of the French
King or the Norman Duke. In England the parable had more truth. It set
forth at once the supreme ecclesiastical authority of the King, and
the check which ancient custom put on that authority in the shape of
an archiepiscopal tribune of the people. But the happy partnership of
the two powers had come to an end. The strong ox Lanfranc was dead.
His surviving yoke-fellow was a young and untameable wild bull.[1127]
With him they wished to yoke an old and feeble sheep, who might
perhaps furnish them with the wool and milk of the Lord’s word, and
with lambs for His service,[1128] but who was utterly unequal to the
task of pulling in fellowship with such a comrade. His weakness and
the King’s fierceness could never work together. If they would only
think over the matter, they would give up the attempt which they had
begun. The joy with which they had hailed his nomination would be
turned into sorrow. They talked of his raising up the Church from
widowhood; if they insisted on forcing him into the see, the Church
would be thrust down into a yet deeper widowhood, widowhood during the
life of her pastor. He himself would be the first victim; none of them
would dare to give him help, and then the King would trample them too
under his feet at pleasure. He then burst into tears; he parted from
the assembly, and went to his own quarters, whether in the city of
Gloucester or at the unnamed place where he had before been
staying.[1129] The King, foreseeing no further difficulties, gave
orders that steps should be taken for investing him without delay with
the temporal possessions of the see.[1130] But a whole train of
unlooked-for hindrances appeared before Anselm could be put into
possession of either the temporal or the spiritual powers of Lanfranc.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: The royal right of investiture not questioned.]
[Sidenote: No scruples on the part of Anselm.]
[Sidenote: No ecclesiastical election.]
[Sidenote: Later change in Anselm’s views.]
[Sidenote: Gundulf’s letter to the monks of Bec.]
[Sidenote: Sole action of the King.]
At this first stage of the story, as at every other, as long as the
scene is laid in England, we are struck in the strongest way by the
fact that every one concerned takes the ancient customs of England for
granted. If those customs have changed from what they may have been
under Cnut or Eadward, they have at least not changed to the advantage
of the Roman see, or indeed of the ecclesiastical power in any shape.
Hildebrand has no followers either in England or in Normandy. No one
has called in question the right either of the King of the English or
of the Duke of the Normans to invest the prelates of his dominions
with the pastoral staff. There is not one word in the whole story
implying that any one had any scruple on the subject. Anselm clearly
had none. He had received the staff of Bec from the Duke; if he was
not ready to receive the staff of Canterbury from the King, it was not
because of any scruple as to the mode of appointment, but because he
refused to accept the appointment itself, however made. Not a single
English bishop has a word to say on the matter. We could not look for
such scruples in Wulfstan who had received his staff from the holy
Eadward; but neither do they trouble William of Saint-Calais, so
lately the zealous champion of the rights of Rome. If anything, the
bishops seem to attribute a kind of mystic and almost sacramental
efficacy to the investiture by the King’s hand. Nor is there a word
said as to the rights of any ecclesiastical electors, the monks of
Christ Church or any other. It is taken for granted that the whole
matter rests with the King. Anselm protests against the validity of
the act, but not on any ground which assumed any other elector than
the King. The nomination was invalid, because he did not consent to it
himself, because the Duke of the Normans, the Archbishop of Rouen, and
the monks of Bec, had not consented to it. Anselm is very careful as
to the rights of all these three; he has not a word to say about the
rights of the monks of Christ Church. Had he been a subject of the
crown of England, a bishop or presbyter of the province of Canterbury,
and himself willing to accept the archbishopric, there would clearly
have been in his eyes nothing irregular in his accepting it in the
form in which it was forced upon him, by the sole choice and sole
investiture of the King. He afterwards learned to think otherwise; but
it was neither at Canterbury nor at Bec nor at Aosta that he learned
such scruples. He had to go beyond English, Norman, and Burgundian
ground to look for them. At present he does at every stage, as an
ordinary matter of course, something which his later lights would have
led him to condemn. But it certainly does seem strange when Bishop
Gundulf of Rochester, in a letter to his old companions the monks of
Bec, tells them that the King had given the government of the church
of Canterbury to their abbot Anselm, by the advice and request of his
great men and by the petition and election of the clergy and
people.[1131] We have often come across such phrases;[1132] and this
case, where we know every detail, may help us to estimate their
meaning in some other cases. That Anselm’s appointment had been the
general wish of all classes before it was made, that it received the
general approval of all classes after it was made, there is no manner
of doubt. But there is no sign of any formal advice, petition, or
election, by any class of men at any stage. It may be that the
ceremony in the church at Gloucester was held to pass for an election
by the clergy and people. But that was after the King had, by the
delivery of the staff, given to Anselm the government of the church of
Canterbury. Even in Gundulf’s formula, the advice, petition, and
election are mere helps to guide the King’s choice; it is the King who
actually bestows the see. And here again, of the rights of the monks
of the metropolitan church there is not a word.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Anselm tarries with Gundulf.]
[Sidenote: Consent of the Duke, the Archbishop of Rouen, and the monks
of Bec.]
Several months passed after this amazing scene at Gloucester before
Anselm was fully admitted to the full possession of the archbishopric.
He had not yet given any consent himself, and the consents of the
Norman Duke, the Norman Archbishop, and the Norman monks, on all of
which Anselm laid such stress, were still to be sought for. The King
sent messengers to all of them, and meanwhile Anselm was, by the
King’s order, lodged on some of the archiepiscopal manors under the
care of his old friend Bishop Gundulf.[1133] One may suspect that it
was the influence of this prelate, a good man plainly, but not very
stout-hearted, and more ready than Anselm to adapt himself to the
ruling powers, which brought Anselm to the belief that he ought to
give way to what he himself calls the choice of all England, and which
he now allows to be the will of God. At any rate Anselm brought
himself to write letters to the monks of Bec, asking their consent to
his resignation of the abbey and acceptance of the archbishopric.[1134]
For it was with the monks of Bec that the difficulty lay; Duke Robert
and Archbishop William seem to have made no objection.[1135] It was,
after much hesitation, and by a narrow majority only that the convent
agreed to part with the abbot who had brought such honour upon their
house.[1136] In the end all the needful consents were given. Anselm
was free from all obligations beyond the sea. But he still had not
given his own formal consent to the acceptance of the archbishopric. A
long series of acts, temporal and spiritual, were needed to change the
simple monk and presbyter, as he was now once more, into an Archbishop
of Canterbury, clothed with the full powers and possessions of the
Patriarch of all the nations beyond the sea. Those acts needed the
consent, some of them needed the personal action, of the King. And
King William the Red was now again quite another man from what he had
been when he lay on his sick bed at Gloucester.
[Sidenote: The King’s recovery.]
[Sidenote: The Easter Gemót. 1093.]
[Sidenote: William falls back into evil ways.]
[Sidenote: His renewed blasphemy.]
[Sidenote: He recalls his acts of mercy.]
[Sidenote: He keeps his purpose as to Anselm.]
The King’s sickness is said to have lasted during the whole of Lent;
but he seems to have been restored to health early enough to hold the
Easter Gemót at Winchester.[1137] Anselm was there, in company with
his guardian Bishop Gundulf and his friend Baldwin the monk of Bec;
but there is no mention of any business being done between him and the
King. Doubtless the needful letters had not yet come from Normandy,
even if Anselm had so soon brought himself to write those which were
needful on his own part. By this time William was again in full
health, and, with his former state of body, his former state of mind
had also come back. He had repented of his repentance; he had fallen
back into all his old evil courses with more eagerness than ever. All
the wrong that he had done before he fell sick was deemed to be a
small matter compared with the wrong which he did after he was
restored to health.[1138] It is to this stage of his life that one of
the most hideous of his blasphemous sayings is assigned. Instead of
thankfulness for his renewed health, he looked on his sickness as a
wrong done to him by his Maker, for which he would in some way have
his revenge. It was now that he told Bishop Gundulf, whom we can fancy
faintly exhorting him to keep in the good frame of mind which he had
put on while he lay on his sick bed――“God shall never see me a good
man; I have suffered too much at his hands.”[1139] And his practice
was such as became the fool who said that there was no God, or rather
the deeper fool who said that there was a God, and yet defied him. He
even went on to undo, as far as lay in his power, the good works which
he had done during his momentary repentance. Some of the prisoners to
whom he had promised deliverance were already set free, and some of
those who were set free had taken themselves beyond his reach. But
those who were still in safe-keeping were kept in yet harsher bondage
than before; and of those who had been set free as many as could be
laid hold of were sent back to their prisons. The pardons, the
remissions of debts, which had been put forth were recalled. Every man
who had been held liable before the King’s sickness was held liable
again. His gifts to monasteries were also recalled.[1140] But one
thing which William had promised to do he remained as fully minded to
do as before. At no stage did he show the slightest purpose of
recalling his grant of the archbishopric to Anselm. This distinction
is quite in harmony with the general character of William Rufus. The
reforms which he had promised, and which he had partly carried out,
were part of the ordinary duty of a man in that state of life to which
William had been called, the state of a king. As such, they were
reckoned by him among those promises which it was beyond his power to
fulfil. But his engagement to Anselm was of another kind. To say
nothing of Anselm being the old friend of his father, his engagement
to him was strictly personal. If it was not exactly done in the
character of a good knight, it was done as the act of a man to a man.
It was like a safe-conduct; it touched, not so much William’s kingly
duty as his personal honour. William’s honour did not keep him back
from annoying and insulting Anselm, or from haggling with him about
money in a manner worthy of the chivalrous Richard himself. But it did
keep him back from any attempt to undo his own personal act and
promise. He had prayed Anselm to take the archbishopric; he had forced
the staff, as far as might be, into Anselm’s unwilling hand. From that
act he would not draw back, though he was quite ready to get any
advantage for himself that might be had in the way of carrying it out.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Events of March-December, 1093.]
[Sidenote: Affairs of England and Wales.]
[Sidenote: Dealings between William and Malcolm.]
[Sidenote: Designs of Rufus on Normandy.]
[Sidenote: Action of William of Eu.]
[Sidenote: His divided allegiance.]
[Sidenote: He suggests an attack on Normandy.]
[Sidenote: William and Robert Count of Flanders.]
[Sidenote: Death of Count Robert. October 4 or 13, 1093.]
[Sidenote: Robert of Jerusalem.]
[Sidenote: Relation between William and the Flemish Counts.]