Probably the destruction of the royal abbeys caused the building of numerous parish churches during this period, and of the collegiate churches which were planted in the principal centres of the population. The former were mostly endowed with lands or tithes to support the parish clergy, or to recompense the canons who should attend the church, in which latter case the tithes were probably "appropriated" to the cathedral.
So the system developed until about the year 1000, when began, in Mercia, a new age of monasteries, not like the old royal abbeys which had mostly been destroyed, but houses that were filled with monks or nuns of the Benedictine order. These competed with the secular clergy in appropriating the endowments of the churches, and a jealousy began between the two systems which blazed continually, with greater or less heat, until the final overthrow of the monasteries by Henry VIII. at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Early in the eleventh century was founded, at Coventry, the Benedictine abbey which had so great a share in the history of the diocese. Its founder, Earl Leofric, was the husband of the beautiful Godiva whose ride through the town made Coventry free from tolls.
"I, Luriche, for love of thee,
Doe make Coventre toll-free,"
are the old words. She induced her husband to found and endow the abbey with its twenty-four monks; she herself contributed her gold and silver, and the monastery became so wealthy that "the walls seemed almost too strait to hold it all."
Leofwin, bishop of Lichfield (1054-1066), was made the first abbot of Coventry; he died in the year of the Conquest, and was the last Saxon bishop: henceforth a new order of men was to rule the Church in England.
No doubt Lichfield owed to its insignificance as a city the immunity which it again enjoyed while all the neighbouring country was being pillaged. William appointed his own chaplain, Peter (1072-1084), as bishop, and here, no doubt, he lived until 1075, when, at the synod of London, it was decided that the seats of the bishops should be in the larger towns and not in the villages. So to the town of Chester, where there were about 400 or 500 houses, the bishop's seat was moved.
It is interesting to find in "Domesday Book" mention of the extraordinarily heavy fines payable to the bishop at Chester for such offences as the following:—"If any free man does work on a holy day, the bishop has a forfeit of eight shillings. A slave or maidservant so transgressing pays four shillings. A merchant coming into the city and carrying a stall shall pay to the bishop four shillings if he take it down between the ninth hour of the Sabbath and Monday without licence from the bishop's officer."
Following Peter came Robert de Lymesey (1087-1117), who, after waiting a short time, obtained papal leave to remove his seat to Coventry, the barony of which he bought from the king; and so he became both bishop and abbot, and for about a century his successors united the two offices. This arrangement was not at all to the taste of the monks, and constant quarrels occurred. Robert de Lymesey is said to have rifled the place; some contend, for the sake of the cathedral at Lichfield, but others, in order to prosecute the suit at Rome in which he was involved with the monks.