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William the Conqueror

<h2>CHAPTER IX. THE SETTLEMENT OF ENGLAND. 1070–1086.</h2> England was now fully conquered, and William could for a moment sit down quietly to the rule of the kingdom that he had won.  The time that immediately followed is spoken of as a time of comparative quiet, and of less oppression than the times either before or after.  Before and after, warfare, on one side of the sea or the other, was the main business.  Hitherto William has been winning his kingdom in arms.  Afterwards he was more constantly called away to his foreign dominions, and his absence always led to greater oppression in England.  Just now he had a moment of repose, when he could give his mind to the affairs of Church and State in England.  Peace indeed was not quite unbroken.  Events were tending to that famous revolt in the Fenland which is perhaps the best remembered part of William’s reign.  But even this movement was merely local, and did not seriously interfere with William’s government.  He was now striving to settle the land in peace, and to make his rule as little grievous to the conquered as might be.  The harrying of Northumberland showed that he now shrank from no harshness that would serve his ends; but from mere purposeless oppression he was still free.  Nor was he ever inclined to needless change or to that scorn of the conquered which meaner conquerors have often shown.  He clearly wished both to change and to oppress as little as he could.  This is a side of him which has been greatly misunderstood, largely through the book that passes for the History of Ingulf Abbot of Crowland.  Ingulf was William’s English secretary; a real history of his writing would be most precious.  But the book that goes by his name is a forgery not older than the fourteenth century, and is in all points contradicted by the genuine documents of the time.  Thus the forger makes William try to abolish the English language and order the use of French in legal writings.  This is pure fiction.  The truth is that, from the time of William’s coming, English goes out of use in legal writings, but only gradually, and not in favour of French.  Ever since the coming of Augustine, English and Latin had been alternative tongues; after the coming of William English becomes less usual, and in the course of the twelfth century it goes out of use in favour of Latin.  There are no French documents till the thirteenth century, and in that century English begins again.  Instead of abolishing the English tongue, William took care that his English-born son should learn it, and he even began to learn it himself.  A king of those days held it for his duty to hear and redress his subjects’ complaints; he had to go through the land and see for himself that those who acted in his name did right among his people.  This earlier kings had done; this William wished to do; but he found his ignorance of English a hindrance.  Cares of other kinds checked his English studies, but he may have learned enough to understand the meaning of his own English charters.  Nor did William try, as he is often imagined to have done, to root out the ancient institutions of England, and to set up in their stead either the existing institutions of Normandy or some new institutions of his own devising.  The truth is that with William began a gradual change in the laws and customs of England, undoubtedly great, but far less than is commonly thought.  French names have often supplanted English, and have made the amount of change seem greater than it really was.  Still much change did follow on the Norman Conquest, and the Norman Conquest was so completely William’s own act that all that came of it was in some sort his act also.  But these changes were mainly the gradual results of the state of things which followed William’s coming; they were but very slightly the results of any formal acts of his.  With a foreign king and foreigners in all high places, much practical change could not fail to follow, even where the letter of the law was unchanged.  Still the practical change was less than if the letter of the law had been changed as well.  English law was administered by foreign judges; the foreign grantees of William held English land according to English law.  The Norman had no special position as a Norman; in every rank except perhaps the very highest and the very lowest, he had Englishmen to his fellows.  All this helped to give the Norman Conquest of England its peculiar character, to give it an air of having swept away everything English, while its real work was to turn strangers into Englishmen.  And that character was impressed on William’s work by William himself.  The king claiming by legal right, but driven to assert his right by the sword, was unlike both the foreign king who comes in by peaceful succession and the foreign king who comes in without even the pretext of law.  The Normans too, if born soldiers, were also born lawyers, and no man was more deeply impressed with the legal spirit than William himself.  He loved neither to change the law nor to transgress the law, and he had little need to do either.  He knew how to make the law his instrument, and, without either changing or transgressing it, to use it to make himself all-powerful.  He thoroughly enjoyed that system of legal fictions and official euphemisms which marks his reign.  William himself became in some sort an Englishman, and those to whom he granted English lands had in some sort to become Englishmen in order to hold them.  The Norman stepped into the exact place of the Englishman whose land he held; he took his rights and his burthens, and disputes about those rights and burthens were judged according to English law by the witness of Englishmen.  Reigning over two races in one land, William would be lord of both alike, able to use either against the other in case of need.  He would make the most of everything in the feelings and customs of either that tended to strengthen his own hands.  And, in the state of things in which men then found themselves, whatever strengthened William’s hands strengthened law and order in his kingdom. There was therefore nothing to lead William to make any large changes in the letter of the English law.  The powers of a King of the English, wielded as he knew how to wield them, made him as great as he could wish to be.  Once granting the original wrong of his coming at all and bringing a host of strangers with him, there is singularly little to blame in the acts of the Conqueror.  Of bloodshed, of wanton interference with law and usage, there is wonderfully little.  Englishmen and Normans were held to have settled down in peace under the equal protection of King William.  The two races were drawing together; the process was beginning which, a hundred years later, made it impossible, in any rank but the highest and the lowest, to distinguish Norman from Englishman.  Among the smaller landowners and the townsfolk this intermingling had already begun, while earls and bishops were not yet so exclusively Norman, nor had the free churls of England as yet sunk so low as at a later stage.  Still some legislation was needed to settle the relations of the two races.  King William proclaimed the “renewal of the law of King Edward.”  This phrase has often been misunderstood; it is a common form when peace and good order are restored after a period of disturbance.  The last reign which is looked back to as to a time of good government becomes the standard of good government, and it is agreed between king and people, between contending races or parties, that things shall be as they were in the days of the model ruler.  So we hear in Normandy of the renewal of the law of Rolf, and in England of the renewal of the law of Cnut.  So at an earlier time Danes and Englishmen agreed in the renewal of the law of Edgar.  So now Normans and Englishmen agreed in the renewal of the law of Edward.  There was no code either of Edward’s or of William’s making.  William simply bound himself to rule as Edward had ruled.  But in restoring the law of King Edward, he added, “with the additions which I have decreed for the advantage of the people of the English.” These few words are indeed weighty.  The little legislation of William’s reign takes throughout the shape of additions.  Nothing old is repealed; a few new enactments are set up by the side of the old ones.  And these words describe, not only William’s actual legislation, but the widest general effect of his coming.  The Norman Conquest did little towards any direct abolition of the older English laws or institutions.  But it set up some new institutions alongside of old ones; and it brought in not a few names, habits, and ways of looking at things, which gradually did their work.  In England no man has pulled down; many have added and modified.  Our law is still the law of King Edward with the additions of King William.  Some old institutions took new names; some new institutions with new names sprang up by the side of old ones.  Sometimes the old has lasted, sometimes the new.  We still have a king and not a roy; but he gathers round him a parliament and not a vitenagemót.  We have a sheriff and not a viscount; but his district is more commonly called a county than a shire.  But county and shire are French and English for the same thing, and “parliament” is simply French for the “deep speech” which King William had with his Witan.  The National Assembly of England has changed its name and its constitution more than once; but it has never been changed by any sudden revolution, never till later times by any formal enactment.  There was no moment when one kind of assembly supplanted another.  And this has come because our Conqueror was, both by his disposition and his circumstances, led to act as a preserver and not as a destroyer. The greatest recorded acts of William, administrative and legislative, come in the last days of his reign.  But there are several enactments of William belonging to various periods of his reign, and some of them to this first moment of peace.  Here we distinctly see William as an English statesman, as a statesman who knew how to work a radical change under conservative forms.  One enactment, perhaps the earliest of all, provided for the safety of the strangers who had come with him to subdue and to settle in the land.  The murder of a Norman by an Englishman, especially of a Norman intruder by a dispossessed Englishman, was a thing that doubtless often happened.  William therefore provides for the safety of those whom he calls “the men whom I brought with me or who have come after me;” that is, the warriors of Senlac, Exeter, and York.  These men are put within his own peace; wrong done to them is wrong done to the King, his crown and dignity.  If the murderer cannot be found, the lord and, failing him, the hundred, must make payment to the King.  Of this grew the presentment of Englishry, one of the few formal badges of distinction between the conquering and the conquered race.  Its practical need could not have lasted beyond a generation or two, but it went on as a form ages after it had lost all meaning.  An unknown corpse, unless it could be proved that the dead man was English, was assumed to be that of a man who had come with King William, and the fine was levied.  Some other enactments were needed when two nations lived side by side in the same land.  As in earlier times, Roman and barbarian each kept his own law, so now for some purposes the Frenchman—“Francigena”—and the Englishman kept their own law.  This is chiefly with regard to the modes of appealing to God’s judgement in doubtful cases.  The English did this by ordeal, the Normans by wager of battle.  When a man of one nation appealed a man of the other, the accused chose the mode of trial.  If an Englishman appealed a Frenchman and declined to prove his charge either way, the Frenchman might clear himself by oath.  But these privileges were strictly confined to Frenchmen who had come with William and after him.  Frenchmen who had in Edward’s time settled in England as the land of their own choice, reckoned as Englishmen.  Other enactments, fresh enactments of older laws, touched both races.  The slave trade was rife in its worst form; men were sold out of the land, chiefly to the Danes of Ireland.  Earlier kings had denounced the crime, and earlier bishops had preached against it.  William denounced it again under the penalty of forfeiture of all lands and goods, and Saint Wulfstan, the Bishop of Worcester, persuaded the chief offenders, Englishmen of Bristol, to give up their darling sin for a season.  Yet in the next reign Anselm and his synod had once more to denounce the crime under spiritual penalties, when they had no longer the strong arm of William to enforce them. Another law bears more than all the personal impress of William.  In it he at once, on one side, forestalls the most humane theories of modern times, and on the other sins most directly against them.  His remarkable unwillingness to put any man to death, except among the chances of the battle-field, was to some extent the feeling of his age.  With him the feeling takes the shape of a formal law.  He forbids the infliction of death for any crime whatever.  But those who may on this score be disposed to claim the Conqueror as a sympathizer will be shocked at the next enactment.  Those crimes which kings less merciful than William would have punished with death are to be punished with loss of eyes or other foul and cruel mutilations.  Punishments of this kind now seem more revolting than death, though possibly, now as then, the sufferer himself might think otherwise.  But in those days to substitute mutilation for death, in the case of crimes which were held to deserve death, was universally deemed an act of mercy.  Grave men shrank from sending their fellow-creatures out of the world, perhaps without time for repentance; but physical sympathy with physical suffering had little place in their minds.  In the next century a feeling against bodily mutilation gradually comes in; but as yet the mildest and most thoughtful men, Anselm himself, make no protest against it when it is believed to be really deserved.  There is no sign of any general complaint on this score.  The English Chronicler applauds the strict police of which mutilation formed a part, and in one case he deliberately holds it to be the fitting punishment of the offence.  In fact, when penal settlements were unknown and legal prisons were few and loathsome, there was something to be said for a punishment which disabled the criminal from repeating his offence.  In William’s jurisprudence mutilation became the ordinary sentence of the murderer, the robber, the ravisher, sometimes also of English revolters against William’s power.  We must in short balance his mercy against the mercy of Kirk and Jeffreys. The ground on which the English Chronicler does raise his wail on behalf of his countrymen is the special jurisprudence of the forests and the extortions of money with which he charges the Conqueror.  In both these points the royal hand became far heavier under the Norman rule.  In both William’s character grew darker as he grew older.  He is charged with unlawful exactions of money, in his character alike of sovereign and of landlord.  We read of his sharp practice in dealing with the profits of the royal demesnes.  He would turn out the tenant to whom he had just let the land, if another offered a higher rent.  But with regard to taxation, we must remember that William’s exactions, however heavy at the time, were a step in the direction of regular government.  In those days all taxation was disliked.  Direct taking of the subject’s money by the King was deemed an extraordinary resource to be justified only by some extraordinary emergency, to buy off the Danes or to hire soldiers against them.  Men long after still dreamed that the King could “live of his own,” that he could pay all expenses of his court and government out of the rents and services due to him as a landowner, without asking his people for anything in the character of sovereign.  Demands of money on behalf of the King now became both heavier and more frequent.  And another change which had long been gradually working now came to a head.  When, centuries later, the King was bidden to “live of his own,” men had forgotten that the land of the King had once been the land of the nation.  In all Teutonic communities, great and small, just as in the city communities of Greece and Italy, the community itself was a chief landowner.  The nation had its folkland, its ager publicus, the property of no one man but of the whole state.  Out of this, by the common consent, portions might be cut off and booked—granted by a written document—to particular men as their own bookland.  The King might have his private estate, to be dealt with at his own pleasure, but of the folkland, the land of the nation, he was only the chief administrator, bound to act by the advice of his Witan.  But in this case more than in others, the advice of the Witan could not fail to become formal; the folkland, ever growing through confiscations, ever lessening through grants, gradually came to be looked on as the land of the King, to be dealt with as he thought good.  We must not look for any change formally enacted; but in Edward’s day the notion of folkland, as the possession of the nation and not of the King, could have been only a survival, and in William’s day even the survival passed away.  The land which was practically the land of King Edward became, as a matter of course, Terra Regis, the land of King William.  That land was now enlarged by greater confiscations and lessened by greater grants than ever.  For a moment, every lay estate had been part of the land of William.  And far more than had been the land of the nation remained the land of the King, to be dealt with as he thought good. In the tenure of land William seems to have made no formal change.  But the circumstances of his reign gave increased strength to certain tendencies which had been long afloat.  And out of them, in the next reign, the malignant genius of Randolf Flambard devised a systematic code of oppression.  Yet even in his work there is little of formal change.  There are no laws of William Rufus.  The so called feudal incidents, the claims of marriage, wardship, and the like, on the part of the lord, the ancient heriot developed into the later relief, all these things were in the germ under William, as they had been in the germ long before him.  In the hands of Randolf Flambard they stiffen into established custom; their legal acknowledgement comes from the charter of Henry the First which promises to reform their abuses.  Thus the Conqueror clearly claimed the right to interfere with the marriages of his nobles, at any rate to forbid a marriage to which he objected on grounds of policy.  Under Randolf Flambard this became a regular claim, which of course was made a means of extorting money.  Under Henry the claim is regulated and modified, but by being regulated and modified, it is legally established. The ordinary administration of the kingdom went on under William, greatly modified by the circumstances of his reign, but hardly at all changed in outward form.  Like the kings that were before him, he “wore his crown” at the three great feasts, at Easter at Winchester, at Pentecost at Westminster, at Christmas at Gloucester.  Like the kings that were before him, he gathered together the great men of the realm, and when need was, the small men also.  Nothing seems to have been changed in the constitution or the powers of the assembly; but its spirit must have been utterly changed.  The innermost circle, earls, bishops, great officers of state and household, gradually changed from a body of Englishmen with a few strangers among them into a body of strangers among whom two or three Englishmen still kept their places.  The result of their “deep speech” with William was not likely to be other than an assent to William’s will.  The ordinary freeman did not lose his abstract right to come and shout “Yea, yea,” to any addition that King William made to the law of King Edward.  But there would be nothing to tempt him to come, unless King William thought fit to bid him.  But once at least William did gather together, if not every freeman, at least all freeholders of the smallest account.  On one point the Conqueror had fully made up his mind; on one point he was to be a benefactor to his kingdom through all succeeding ages.  The realm of England was to be one and indivisible.  No ruler or subject in the kingdom of England should again dream that that kingdom could be split asunder.  When he offered Harold the underkingship of the realm or of some part of it, he did so doubtless only in the full conviction that the offer would be refused.  No such offer should be heard of again.  There should be no such division as had been between Cnut and Edmund, between Harthacnut and the first Harold, such as Edwin and Morkere had dreamed of in later times.  Nor should the kingdom be split asunder in that subtler way which William of all men best understood, the way in which the Frankish kingdoms, East and West, had split asunder.  He would have no dukes or earls who might become kings in all but name, each in his own duchy or earldom.  No man in his realm should be to him as he was to his overlord at Paris.  No man in his realm should plead duty towards an immediate lord as an excuse for breach of duty towards the lord of that immediate lord.  Hence William’s policy with regard to earldoms.  There was to be nothing like the great governments which had been held by Godwine, Leofric, and Siward; an Earl of the West-Saxons or the Northumbrians was too like a Duke of the Normans to be endured by one who was Duke of the Normans himself.  The earl, even of the king’s appointment, still represented the separate being of the district over which he was set.  He was the king’s representative rather than merely his officer; if he was a magistrate and not a prince, he often sat in the seat of former princes, and might easily grow into a prince.  And at last, at the very end of his reign, as the finishing of his work, he took the final step that made England for ever one.  In 1086 every landowner in England swore to be faithful to King William within and without England and to defend him against his enemies.  The subject’s duty to the King was to any duty which the vassal might owe to any inferior lord.  When the King was the embodiment of national unity and orderly government, this was the greatest of all steps in the direction of both.  Never did William or any other man act more distinctly as an English statesman, never did any one act tell more directly towards the later making of England, than this memorable act of the Conqueror.  Here indeed is an addition which William made to the law of Edward for the truest good of the English folk.  And yet no enactment has ever been more thoroughly misunderstood.  Lawyer after lawyer has set down in his book that, at the assembly of Salisbury in 1086, William introduced “the feudal system.”  If the words “feudal system” have any meaning, the object of the law now made was to hinder any “feudal system” from coming into England.  William would be king of a kingdom, head of a commonwealth, personal lord of every man in his realm, not merely, like a King of the French, external lord of princes whose subjects owed him no allegiance.  This greatest monument of the Conqueror’s statesmanship was carried into effect in a special assembly of the English nation gathered on the first day of August 1086 on the great plain of Salisbury.  Now, perhaps for the first time, we get a distinct foreshadowing of Lords and Commons.  The Witan, the great men of the realm, and “the landsitting men,” the whole body of landowners, are now distinguished.  The point is that William required the personal presence of every man whose personal allegiance he thought worth having.  Every man in the mixed assembly, mixed indeed in race and speech, the King’s own men and the men of other lords, took the oath and became the man of King William.  On that day England became for ever a kingdom one and indivisible, which since that day no man has dreamed of parting asunder. <div class="gapspace"> </div> The great assembly of 1086 will come again among the events of William’s later reign; it comes here as the last act of that general settlement which began in 1070.  That settlement, besides its secular side, has also an ecclesiastical side of a somewhat different character.  In both William’s coming brought the island kingdom into a closer connexion with the continent; and brought a large displacement of Englishmen and a large promotion of strangers.  But on the ecclesiastical side, though the changes were less violent, there was a more marked beginning of a new state of things.  The religious missionary was more inclined to innovate than the military conqueror.  Here William not only added but changed; on one point he even proclaimed that the existing law of England was bad.  Certainly the religious state of England was likely to displease churchmen from the mainland.  The English Church, so directly the child of the Roman, was, for that very reason, less dependent on her parent.  She was a free colony, not a conquered province.  The English Church too was most distinctly national; no land came so near to that ideal state of things in which the Church is the nation on its religious side.  Papal authority therefore was weaker in England than elsewhere, and a less careful line was drawn between spiritual and temporal things and jurisdictions.  Two friendly powers could take liberties with each other.  The national assemblies dealt with ecclesiastical as well as with temporal matters; one indeed among our ancient laws blames any assembly that did otherwise.  Bishop and earl sat together in the local Gemót, to deal with many matters which, according to continental ideas, should have been dealt with in separate courts.  And, by what in continental eyes seemed a strange laxity of discipline, priests, bishops, members of capitular bodies, were often married.  The English diocesan arrangements were unlike continental models.  In Gaul, by a tradition of Roman date, the bishop was bishop of the city.  His diocese was marked by the extent of the civil jurisdiction of the city.  His home, his head church, his bishopstool in the head church, were all in the city.  In Teutonic England the bishop was commonly bishop, not of a city but of a tribe or district; his style was that of a tribe; his home, his head church, his bishopstool, might be anywhere within the territory of that tribe.  Still, on the greatest point of all, matters in England were thoroughly to William’s liking; nowhere did the King stand forth more distinctly as the Supreme Governor of the Church.  In England, as in Normandy, the right of the sovereign to the investiture of ecclesiastical benefices was ancient and undisputed.  What Edward had freely done, William went on freely doing, and Hildebrand himself never ventured on a word of remonstrance against a power which he deemed so wrongful in the hands of his own sovereign.  William had but to stand on the rights of his predecessors.  When Gregory asked for homage for the crown which he had in some sort given, William answered indeed as an English king.  What the kings before him had done for or paid to the Roman see, that would he do and pay; but this no king before him had ever done, nor would he be the first to do it.  But while William thus maintained the rights of his crown, he was willing and eager to do all that seemed needful for ecclesiastical reform.  And the general result of his reform was to weaken the insular independence of England, to make her Church more like the other Churches of the West, and to increase the power of the Roman Bishop. William had now a fellow-worker in his taste.  The subtle spirit which had helped to win his kingdom was now at his side to help him to rule it.  Within a few months after the taking of Chester Lanfranc sat on the throne of Augustine.  As soon as the actual Conquest was over, William began to give his mind to ecclesiastical matters.  It might look like sacrilege when he caused all the monasteries of England to be harried.  But no harm was done to the monks or to their possessions.  The holy houses were searched for the hoards which the rich men of England, fearing the new king, had laid up in the monastic treasuries.  William looked on these hoards as part of the forfeited goods of rebels, and carried them off during the Lent of 1070.  This done, he sat steadily down to the reform of the English Church. He had three papal legates to guide him, one of whom, Ermenfrid, Bishop of Sitten, had come in on a like errand in the time of Edward.  It was a kind of solemn confirmation of the Conquest, when, at the assembly held at Winchester in 1070, the King’s crown was placed on his head by Ermenfrid.  The work of deposing English prelates and appointing foreign successors now began.  The primacy of York was regularly vacant; Ealdred had died as the Danes sailed up the Humber to assault or to deliver his city.  The primacy of Canterbury was to be made vacant by the deposition of Stigand.  His canonical position had always been doubtful; neither Harold nor William had been crowned by him; yet William had treated him hitherto with marked courtesy, and he had consecrated at least one Norman bishop, Remigius of Dorchester.  He was now deprived both of the archbishopric and of the bishopric of Winchester which he held with it, and was kept under restraint for the rest of his life.  According to foreign canonical rules the sentence may pass as just; but it marked a stage in the conquest of England when a stout-hearted Englishman was removed from the highest place in the English Church to make way for the innermost counsellor of the Conqueror.  In the Pentecostal assembly, held at Windsor, Lanfranc was appointed archbishop; his excuses were overcome by his old master Herlwin of Bec; he came to England, and on August 15, 1070 he was consecrated to the primacy. Other deprivations and appointments took place in these assemblies.  The see of York was given to Thomas, a canon of Bayeux, a man of high character and memorable in the local history of his see.  The abbey of Peterborough was vacant by the death of Brand, who had received the staff from the uncrowned Eadgar.  It was only by rich gifts that he had turned away the wrath of William from his house.  The Fenland was perhaps already stirring, and the Abbot of Peterborough might have to act as a military commander.  In this case the prelate appointed, a Norman named Turold, was accordingly more of a soldier than of a monk.  From these assemblies of 1070 the series of William’s ecclesiastical changes goes on.  As the English bishops die or are deprived, strangers take their place.  They are commonly Normans, but Walcher, who became Bishop of Durham in 1071, was one of those natives of Lorraine who had been largely favoured in Edward’s day.  At the time of William’s death Wulfstan was the only Englishman who kept a bishopric.  Even his deprivation had once been thought of.  The story takes a legendary shape, but it throws an important light on the relations of Church and State in England.  In an assembly held in the West Minster Wulfstan is called on by William and Lanfranc to give up his staff.  He refuses; he will give it back to him who gave it, and places it on the tomb of his dead master Edward.  No of his enemies can move it.  The sentence is recalled, and the staff yields to his touch.  Edward was not yet a canonized saint; the appeal is simply from the living and foreign king to the dead and native king.  This legend, growing up when Western Europe was torn in pieces by the struggle about investitures, proves better than the most authentic documents how the right which Popes denied to Emperors was taken for granted in the case of an English king.  But, while the spoils of England, temporal and spiritual, were thus scattered abroad among men of the conquering race, two men at least among them refused all share in plunder which they deemed unrighteous.  One gallant Norman knight, Gulbert of Hugleville, followed William through all his campaigns, but when English estates were offered as his reward, he refused to share in unrighteous gains, and went back to the lands of his fathers which he could hold with a good conscience.  And one monk, Wimund of Saint-Leutfried, not only refused bishoprics and abbeys, but rebuked the Conqueror for wrong and robbery.  And William bore no grudge against his censor, but, when the archbishopric of Rouen became vacant, he offered it to the man who had rebuked him.  Among the worthies of England Gulbert and Wimund can hardly claim a place, but a place should surely be theirs among the men whom England honours. <div class="gapspace"> </div> The primacy of Lanfranc is one of the most memorable in our history.  In the words of the parable put forth by Anselm in the next reign, the plough of the English Church was for seventeen years drawn by two oxen of equal strength.  By ancient English custom the Archbishop of Canterbury was the King’s special counsellor, the special representative of his Church and people.  Lanfranc cannot be charged with any direct oppression; yet in the hands of a stranger who had his spiritual conquest to make, the tribunitian office of former archbishops was lost in that of chief minister of the sovereign.  In the first action of their joint rule, the interest of king and primate was the same.  Lanfranc sought for a more distinct acknowledgement of the superiority of Canterbury over the rival metropolis of York.  And this fell in with William’s schemes for the consolidation of the kingdom.  The political motive is avowed.  Northumberland, which had been so hard to subdue and which still lay open to Danish invaders or deliverers, was still dangerous.  An independent Archbishop of York might consecrate a King of the Northumbrians, native or Danish, who might grow into a King of the English.  The Northern metropolitan had unwillingly to admit the superiority, and something more, of the Southern.  The caution of William and his ecclesiastical adviser reckoned it among possible chances that even Thomas of Bayeux might crown an invading Cnut or Harold in opposition to his native sovereign and benefactor. For some of his own purposes, William had perhaps chosen his minister too wisely.  The objects of the two colleagues were not always the same.  Lanfranc, sprung from Imperialist Pavia, was no zealot for extravagant papal claims.  The caution with which he bore himself during the schism which followed the strife between Gregory and Henry brought on him more than one papal censure.  Yet the general tendency of his administration was towards the growth of ecclesiastical, and even of papal, claims.  William never dreamed of giving up his ecclesiastical supremacy or of exempting churchmen from the ordinary power of the law.  But the division of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the increased frequency of synods distinct from the general assemblies of the realm—even though the acts of those synods needed the royal assent—were steps towards that exemption of churchmen from the civil power which was asserted in one memorable saying towards the end of William’s own reign.  William could hold his own against Hildebrand himself; yet the increased intercourse with Rome, the more frequent presence of Roman Legates, all tended to increase the papal claims and the deference yielded to them.  William refused homage to Gregory; but it is significant that Gregory asked for it.  It was a step towards the day when a King of England was glad to offer it.  The increased strictness as to the marriage of the clergy tended the same way.  Lanfranc did not at once enforce the full rigour of Hildebrand’s decrees.  Marriage was forbidden for the future; the capitular clergy had to part from their wives; but the vested interest of the parish priest was respected.  In another point William directly helped to undermine his own authority and the independence of his kingdom.  He exempted his abbey of the Battle from the authority of the diocesan bishop.  With this began a crowd of such exemptions, which, by weakening local authority, strengthened the power of the Roman see.  All these things helped on Hildebrand’s great scheme which made the clergy everywhere members of one distinct and exclusive body, with the Roman Bishop at their head.  Whatever tended to part the clergy from other men tended to weaken the throne of every king.  While William reigned with Lanfranc at his side, these things were not felt; but the seed was sown for the controversy between Henry and Thomas and for the humiliation of John. Even those changes of Lanfranc’s primacy which seem of purely ecclesiastical concern all helped, in some way to increase the intercourse between England and the continent or to break down some insular peculiarity.  And whatever did this increased the power of Rome.  Even the decree of 1075 that bishoprics should be removed to the chief cities of their dioceses helped to make England more like Gaul or Italy.  So did the fancy of William’s bishops and abbots for rebuilding their churches on a greater scale and in the last devised continental style.  All tended to make England less of another world.  On the other hand, one insular peculiarity well served the purposes of the new primate.  Monastic chapters in episcopal churches were almost unknown out of England.  Lanfranc, himself a monk, favoured monks in this matter also.  In several churches the secular canons were displaced by monks.  The corporate spirit of the regulars, and their dependence on Rome, was far stronger than that of the secular clergy.  The secular chapters could be refractory, but the disputes between them and their bishops were mainly of local importance; they form no such part of the general story of ecclesiastical and papal advance as the long tale of the quarrel between the archbishops and the monks of Christ Church. Lanfranc survived William, and placed the crown on the head of his successor.  The friendship between king and archbishop remained unbroken through their joint lives.  Lanfranc’s acts were William’s acts; what the Primate did must have been approved by the King.  How far William’s acts were Lanfranc’s acts it is less easy to say.  But the Archbishop was ever a trusted minister, and a trusted counsellor, and in the King’s frequent absences from England, he often acted as his lieutenant.  We do not find him actually taking a part in warfare, but he duly reports military successes to his sovereign.  It was William’s combined wisdom and good luck to provide himself with a counsellor than whom for his immediate purposes none could be better.  A man either of a higher or a lower moral level than Lanfranc, a saint like Anselm or one of the mere worldly bishops of the time, would not have done his work so well.  William needed an ecclesiastical statesman, neither unscrupulous nor over-scrupulous, and he found him in the lawyer of Pavia, the doctor of Avranches, the monk of Bec, the abbot of Saint Stephen’s.  If Lanfranc sometimes unwittingly outwitted both his master and himself, if his policy served the purposes of Rome more than suited the purposes of either, that is the common course of human affairs.  Great men are apt to forget that systems which they can work themselves cannot be worked by smaller men.  From this error neither William nor Lanfranc was free.  But, from their own point of view, it was their only error.  Their work was to subdue England, soul and body; and they subdued it.  That work could not be done without great wrong: but no other two men of that day could have done it with so little wrong.  The shrinking from needless and violent change which is so strongly characteristic of William, and less strongly of Lanfranc also, made their work at the time easier to be done; in the course of ages it made it easier to be undone. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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