Nature of our reports of the trials. As for the cases themselves and the tribunals before which they were heard, we must always remember that our reports, though very full, are not official. Their authors therefore use technical or non-technical language at pleasure. They assume familiarity with the nature of the court and its mode of procedure; they do not stop to explain many things which we should be very glad if they had stopped to explain. But it is clear that the nature of the proceedings was not exactly the same in the three cases. Comparison of the proceedings in each case. And it is singular that, in point of mere procedure, there seems more likeness between the case of Anselm and the case of Thomas than there is between either and the case of William of Saint-Calais. William William and Thomas summoned to answer a charge. of Saint-Calais and Thomas were both of them, in the strictest sense, summoned before a court to answer a charge. The charges were indeed of quite different kinds in the two cases. William of Saint-Calais was charged with high treason. Thomas, besides a number of demands about money, was charged only with failing to appear in the King’s court in answer to an earlier summons. Anselm seeks advice on a point of law. Anselm, on the other hand, cannot be said to have been really charged with anything, though the King and his party tried to treat him as though he had been. The assembly at Rockingham was gathered at Anselm’s own request, to inform him on a point of law. The King and his bishops tried to treat Anselm as a criminal; but they found that the general feeling of the assembly would not allow them to do so. At Winchester again, Anselm was not summoned to answer any charge, for the charge about the troops in the Welsh war had been dropped at Windsor. The charges, such as they are, which are brought against him turn up as it were casually in the course of the proceedings. Yet the order of things seems much the same in the case of Anselm and in the case of Thomas, while in the case of William of Saint-Calais it seems to be different. Proceedings in the case of William of Saint-Calais. In the case of William of Saint-Calais everything is done in the King’s presence. The Bishop himself has more than once to leave the place of meeting, while particular points are discussed; but there is not that endless going to and fro which there is in the other two cases. In the case of Thomas, as in the case of Anselm, we see plainly the inner room where the King sits with his immediate counsellors, while the Archbishop waits in an outer place with the general body of the assembly. Architectural arrangements. At Northampton we see the architectural arrangement more clearly than either at Rockingham or at Winchester. Thomas enters the great hall, and goes no further, while the King’s inner council is held in the solar.[1627] Constitution of the several assemblies. It is possible, as indeed I have already hinted,[1628] that there was a difference in the nature of the assembly in the case of William of Saint-Calais and in the two cases of Anselm and Thomas. We must remember that in the reign of William Rufus the judicial and administrative system was still only forming itself, and that many things were then vague and irregular, both in fact and in name, which had taken a definite shape in the time of Henry the Second. Between the case of Anselm and the case of Thomas came the justiciarship of Roger of Salisbury and the chancellorship of Thomas himself. The Witenagemót; I am inclined to think that, at Rockingham, at Winchester, at Northampton, the assembly was strictly the great assembly of the nation, the ancient Witenagemót, with such changes in its working as had taken place between the days of the Confessor and the days of William Rufus, and again between the days of William Rufus and the days of Henry the Second. its constitution becomes gradually less popular. Each of these periods of change would of course do something towards taking away from the old popular character of the assembly. At Rockingham that popular character is by no means lost. We are not told where the line, if any, was drawn; but a multitude of monks, clerks, and laymen were there.[1629] At Northampton we hear of no class below the lesser barons; and they, with the sheriffs, wait in the outer hall, till they are specially summoned to the King’s presence. Lessened freedom of speech. At Rockingham too and at Winchester there seems much greater freedom of speech than there is at Northampton. The whole assembly shouts and cheers as it pleases, and a simple knight steps forth to speak and to speak boldly.[1630] At Northampton, as at Rockingham and at Winchester, the Archbishop is allowed the company of his personal followers. William Fitz-Stephen and Herbert of Bosham sit at the feet of Thomas, as Eadmer and Baldwin sit at the feet of Anselm. But at Northampton the disciples are roughly checked in speaking to their master, in a way of which there is no sign in the earlier assemblies. At Rockingham and Winchester again, though the Archbishop stays for the most part outside in the hall, yet he more than once goes unbidden into the presence-chamber, and is even followed thither by his faithful monks. At Northampton Thomas is never admitted to the King’s presence, and no one seems to go into the inner room who is not specially summoned. This may be merely because, as is likely enough, strictness of rule, form, and etiquette had greatly advanced between William Rufus and Henry the Second. Or it may have been because Thomas was strictly summoned to answer a charge, while Anselm was really under no charge at all, but came as a member of the assembly.
The inner and outer council; Another point here arises. I cannot but think that in these great assemblies, consisting of an inner and an outer body, we must see the same kind of distinction which we saw on the great day of Salisbury between the Witan and the landsitting men. foreshadowing of lords and commons. That is, I see in the inner and outer bodies the foreshadowing of Lords and Commons. To this day there is one chamber in which the King’s throne is set; there is another chamber whose occupants do not enter the presence of that throne, except by special summons. I am inclined therefore to see, both in the case of Anselm and in the case of Thomas, a true gathering of the Witan of the realm. Thomas tried before the Witan; Thomas comes, like Strafford or Hastings, to answer a charge before the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament,[1631] that court, which from an assembly of the whole nation, gradually shrank up into an assembly of the present peerage. In the case of Anselm I see the same body acting, not strictly as a court, but rather as the great inquest of the nation, but at the same time fluctuating somewhat, as was but natural in that age, between its judicial and its legislative functions. William before the Thening-mannagemót. But in the tribunal which sat on William of Saint-Calais I am, as I have already said, inclined to see, not the Mickle Gemót of the whole nation, but rather the King’s court in a narrower sense, the representative of the ancient Theningmannagemót, the more strictly official body.[1632] Here we have no division of chambers; the proceedings are strictly those of a court trying a charge, and the King, as chief judge, is present throughout.
Estimate of the three cases. As for the matter of the three cases, the trial of William of Saint-Calais was in itself the perfectly fair trial of a rebel who, in the end, after the custom of the age, came off very lightly for his rebellion. Behaviour of Rufus; There really seems nothing to blame William Rufus for in that matter—William Rufus, that is, still largely guided by Lanfranc—except some characteristic pettinesses just towards the end of the story.[1633] Towards Anselm William appears—save under one or two momentary touches of better feeling—simply as the power of evil striving, by whatever means, to crush the power of good. He seems none the less so, even when on particular points his own case is technically right. of Henry the Second. Henry the Second, acting honestly for the good of his kingdom, both technically and morally right in his main quarrel, stoops to the base and foolish course of trying to crush his adversary by a crowd of charges in which the King seems to have been both morally and technically wrong, and which certainly would never have been brought if the Archbishop had not given offence on other grounds. William Rufus again, and Henry the Second also, each forsook his own position by calling in, when it suited their momentary purposes, the very power which their main position bade them to control and to keep out of their kingdom. Comparison with Henry the First. Not so the great king who came between them. The Lion of Justice knew, and he alone in those days seems to have known, how to carry on a controversy of principle, without ever forsaking his own position, without ever losing his temper or lowering his dignity, without any breach of personal respect and friendship towards the holy man whom his kingly office made it his duty to withstand.
The three years of Anselm’s first sojourn beyond sea concern us for the most part only indirectly. Effect on Anselm of his foreign sojourn. Of their most important aspect, as concerns us, I have spoken elsewhere,[1634] and we shall again see their fruit before the present work is ended. In his journeyings to Lyons, to Rome, to Bari, Anselm learned a new doctrine which he had never found out either at Bec or at Canterbury. It was not for his good that he, who had, like the Primates who had gone before him, received his staff from the King’s hands, and placed his own hands in homage between them, should hear the anathema pronounced against the prince who should bestow or the clerk who should receive any ecclesiastical benefice in such sort as no prince had scrupled to give them, as no clerk had scrupled to receive them, in the days of King Eadward and in the days of King William.[1635] When Anselm came back to England, he came, as we shall see, the same Anselm as of old in every personal quality, in every personal virtue. Change in him. But in all things which touched the relations of popes, kings, and bishops, he came back another man.
His journey. But in the course of Anselm’s adventures, in his foreign journeys, there are details here and there which no Englishman can read without interest. We come across constant signs of the place which England and her Primate held in the minds of men of other lands. Alleged scheme of Odo Duke of Burgundy [1078–1102] against Anselm. We read how no less a prince than Odo Duke of Burgundy, already a crusader in Spain and afterwards a crusader in Palestine, was tempted by the report of the wealth of the great English see to sink into a common robber, and to set forth for the purpose of plundering the Primate as he passed through his land. We read how he was turned from his purpose, when he saw the white hair, the gentle and venerable look, of the Archbishop, the look which won all hearts. Instead of harming him, Odo received his kiss and sought his blessing, and sent him under a safe guard to the borders of his duchy.[1636] We read how the likeness of that venerable face had been painted by cunning limners in the interest of Clement, that the robbers who were sent to seize the faithful follower of Urban might better know their intended victim. Anselm at Rome. We read with some national pride how, at his first interview with Urban, when Anselm bowed himself at the Pontiff’s feet, he was raised, received to his kiss, and seated by him as one of equal rank, the Pope and Patriarch of another world. Council of Lateran. We read how, in the great gathering in the head church of the city and of the world, when no man knew what was the fitting place in a Roman council for a guest such as none had ever seen before, the English Archbishop was placed at the papal bidding in a seat of special honour. Anselm took his seat in that apse which was spared when papal barbarism defaced the long arcades of Constantine, when the patriarchal throne of the world was cast forth as an useless thing,[1637] but which the more relentless havoc of our own day, eager, it would seem, to get rid of all that is older than the dogmas of modern Rome, has ruthlessly swept away. We read how visitors and pilgrims from England bowed to kiss the feet of Anselm, as they would have kissed those of Urban himself, and how the humble saint ever refused such unbecoming worship.[1638] And we are most touched of all to hear how, among all these honours, Anselm was commonly spoken of in Rome, not by his name, not by the titles of his office, but simply as “the holy man.”[1639] At Rome, that name might have a special meaning. It was well deserved by the one suitor at the Roman throne who abstained from the use of Rome’s most convincing argument.
But in the record of Anselm’s wanderings there is one tale which comes home more than any other to the hearts of Englishmen, a tale which carries us back, if not strictly to the days of English freedom, at least to the days when we had a conqueror whom we had made our own. Council of Bari. The fathers are gathered at Bari, in the great minster of the Lykian Nicolas, where the arts of northern and southern Christendom, the massiveness of the Norman, the finer grace of the Greek, are so strangely blended in the pile which was then fresh from the craftsman’s hand. There, in his humility, the pilgrim from Canterbury takes to himself a modest place amongst the other bishops, with the faithful Eadmer sitting at his feet.[1640] The Pope calls on his father and master, Anselm Archbishop of the English, to arise and speak. There, in the city so lately torn away from Eastern Christendom, Anselm is bidden to justify the change which Latin theology had made in that creed of the East which changeth not. The Pope harangues on the sufferings of the Church in various lands, and, above all, on the evil deeds of the tyrant of England. The assembled fathers agree with one voice that the sword of Peter must be drawn, and that such a sinner must be smitten in the face of the whole world. Anselm pleads for Rufus. Then Anselm kneels at the feet of Urban, and craves that no such blow may be dealt on the man who had so deeply wronged him.[1641] But, while these high debates were going on, the curious eye of Eadmer had lighted on an object which spoke straight to his heart as an Englishman and a monk of Christ Church. The cope of Beneventum. Among the assembled prelates the Archbishop of Beneventum appeared clad in a cope of surpassing richness. Eadmer knew at once whence it came; he knew that it had once been one of the glories of Canterbury, worn by Primates of England before England had bowed either to the Norman or to the Dane. Eadmer, brought up from his childhood in the cloister of Christ Church, had been taught as a boy by aged monks who could remember the days of Cnut and Emma. Dealings between Canterbury and Beneventum. Those elders of the house, Eadwig and Blæcman and Farman, had told him how in those days there had been a mighty famine in the land of Apulia, how the then Archbishop of Beneventum had travelled through foreign lands to seek help for his starving flock, how he brought with him a precious relic, the arm of the apostle Bartholomew, and how, having passed through Italy and Gaul, he was led to cross the sea by the fame of the wealth of England and of the piety and bounty of Emma its Lady. She gave him plenteous gifts for his people, and he asked whether she would not give yet more as the price of the precious relic. Emma buys the arm of Saint Bartholomew. The genuineness of the treasure was solemnly sworn to;[1642] a great price was paid for it by the Lady, and, by the special order of King Cnut, it was added as a precious gift to the treasures of the metropolitan church. For in those days, says Eadmer, it was the manner of the English to set the patronage of the saints before all the wealth of this world. Æthelnoth’s gift of the cope. The Archbishop of Beneventum went back, loaded with the alms of England, and bearing with him, among other gifts from his brother Primate Æthelnoth, this very cope richly embroidered with gold with all the skill of English hands. Eadmer, taught by the tradition of his elders, knew the vestment as he saw it in that far land on the shoulders of the successor of the prelate who had come to our island for help in his day of need. Eadmer recognises the cope. He saw it with joy; he pointed it out to Father Anselm, and, feigning ignorance, he asked the Beneventan Archbishop the history of the splendid cope which he wore. He was pleased to find that the tradition of Beneventum was the same as the tradition of Canterbury.[1643] Now that we have made our way into other times and other lands, it is pleasing to look back for a moment, with our faithful Eadmer, to days when England still was England, even though she had already learned to bow to a foreign King and a foreign Lady.
More important in a general view than the details of Anselm’s journey are the negotiations which went on during this time between William, Urban, and Anselm. The Red King’s day of grace was now over. Position of Rufus. The last touch of feeling recorded of him is when he bowed his head to receive Anselm’s blessing. Henceforth he stands out, in a more marked way than ever, in the character which distinguishes him from other kings and from other men. We have had evil kings before and after him; but we have had none other who openly chose evil to be his good, none other who declared himself in plain words to be the personal enemy of the Almighty. Yet, as we have already noticed, the bolts of the Church never lighted on Possible effect of excommunication on him.the head of this worst of royal sinners. We have just seen how once at least he was spared by the merciful intercession of his own victim. We are tempted to stop and think how a formal excommunication would have worked on such an one as William Rufus had now become. Papal excommunications not yet despised. We must remember that the weight of papal excommunications of princes had not yet been lowered, as it came to be lowered afterwards, either by their frequency or by their manifest injustice. The cases which were then fresh in men’s minds were all striking and weighty. The Emperor Henry. The excommunication of the Emperor was, from the papal point of view, a natural stage of the great struggle which was still raging. Philip of France. Philip of France had been excommunicated for a moral offence which seemed the darker because it involved the mockery of an ecclesiastical sacrament. Boleslaus of Poland. 1079. And no man could wonder or blame when, in the days of Hildebrand, Boleslaus of Poland was put out of the communion of the faithful for slaying with his own hands before the altar the bishop who had rebuked him for his sins.[1644] The case most akin to the wanton excommunications of later times had been when Alexander the The case of Harold. Second in form, when Hildebrand in truth, had denounced Harold without a hearing for no crime but that of accepting the crown which his people gave him. But men are so apt to judge by results that the fall of Harold and of England may by this time, even among Englishmen, have begun to be looked on as a witness to the power of the Church’s thunders. In the days of Rufus a papal excommunication was still a real and fearful thing at which men stood aghast. It might not have turned the heart of Rufus; it might even have hardened his heart yet further. Probable effect of an excommunication on the people. But among his people, even among his own courtiers, the effect would doubtless have been such that he must in the end, like Philip, have formally given way. As it was, the bolt never fell; the hand of Anselm stopped it once; other causes, as we shall soon see, stopped it afterwards. And, instead of the formal excommunication of Rome, there came that more striking excommunication by the voice of the English people, when, by a common instinct, they declared William the Red to have no true part in that communion of the faithful from which he had never been formally cut off.
Anselm writes to the Pope from Lyons. The negotiations, if we may so call them, which followed the departure of Anselm may be looked on as beginning with a letter written by Anselm to the Pope from Lyons.[1645] The Archbishop, once out of England, seems to take up a new tone. His new tone. His language with regard to the King’s doings is still singularly mild;[1646] but he now begins to speak, not only of God and right, but of the canons of the Church and the authority of the Pope, as something to which the arbitrary customs of England must give way.[1647] To those customs he cannot agree without perilling his own soul and the souls of his successors. He comes to the Apostolic See for help and counsel.[1648] Anselm at Rome. When he had reached Rome, he again set forth his case more fully, as it had been set forth in the letter from Lyons. Letters to the King. Letters both from Anselm and from the Pope were sent to the King by the same messenger, letters which unluckily are not preserved. The summary of the papal letter seems to point to a lofty tone on the part of the Pontiff. He moves, he exhorts, he at last commands, King William, to leave the goods of the Archbishop free, and to restore everything to him.[1649] Anselm’s own letter was doubtless in a milder strain. The messenger came back, to find both Urban and Anselm again at Rome after the synod at Bari. His reception of the letters. The letter from Urban had been received, though ungraciously; the letter from Anselm was sent back. As soon as the King knew that the bearer was a man of the Archbishop’s, he had sworn by the face of Lucca that, unless the messenger speedily got him away out of his lands, he would have his eyes torn out without fail.[1650]
Mission of William of Warelwast. The Pope however could hardly be left wholly without some answer, however scornfully William might deal with the letter of his own subject. But the answer was not speedy in coming. Its bearer was the trusty clerk William of Warelwast, of whom we have already heard more than once. The King’s business did not now call for the same haste as it had done when the same man was sent to find out who was the true Pope.[1651] Much happened before he came. Amongst other things, not a few travellers came from England and Normandy, bringing with them fresh and fresh reports of the evil doings of the King, some of which we have already heard of. William on the continent. November, 1097-April, 1099. William was now in Normandy. He crossed at Martinmas,[1652] and spent the whole of the next year in the wars of France and Maine. He did not come back to England till the Easter of the year following that.[1653] It was now that he played at Rouen the part of a missionary of the creed of Moses.[1654] But he kept his eye upon England also; for to this time is assigned the story of the fifty Englishmen who so enraged the blaspheming King by proving their innocence by the ordeal.[1655] Nor was it merely rumours of William’s doings at home which found their way into Italy from Normandy and England. While the King was devising his answer to the Pope, his emissaries were busy in other parts of the peninsula. Affairs of Southern Italy. The affairs of the Normans in their two great settlements are always joining in one stream. While Bohemund and Tancred were on their Eastern march, the reigning princes of their house, Roger of Apulia and Roger of Sicily, were carrying on their schemes of advancement west of Hadria. Siege of Capua. Their armies now lay before Capua. Meanwhile Anselm had withdrawn with John Abbot of Telesia to seek quiet in a town of the Abbot’s on the upper Vulturnus, Anselm at Schiavia. whose name of Schiavia may suggest some ethnological questions.[1656] Our guide specially marks that this journey was a journey into Samnium; he may not have fully taken in how truly Telesia was the heart of Samnium, alike in the days of the Pontius of the Caudine Forks and in the days of the Pontius of the Colline Gate.[1657] He writes “Cur Deus Homo.” Here, in his Samnite retreat, Anselm was moulding the theology of all later times by his treatise which told why God became Man.[1658] Meanwhile William of England, at war with righteousness in all its forms, held Helias in his prison at Bayeux,[1659] and plotted against Anselm in his hermitage at Schiavia. When Duke Roger’s army was so near, the master of Normandy deemed that something might be done for his purpose by Norman arms or Norman craft. He sent letters—his letters could go speedily when speed was needed—to stir up Duke Roger to do some mischief to the man whom he hated.[1660] The plot was in vain. Anselm and Urban before Capua. Anselm was invited to the Duke’s camp; he was received there with all honour during a sojourn of some time, as he was at every other point of the Duke’s dominions to which he went.[1661] The Pope and Anselm, patriarchs of two worlds, were Duke Roger’s guests at the same time. But only the rich dared to present themselves in the presence of the Pope of the mainland, while the shepherd of the nations beyond the sea welcomed men of all kinds lovingly.[1662] Anselm and the Saracens. The very Saracens whom Count Roger had brought from Sicily to the help of his nephew pressed to visit the holy man of another faith, to be received and fed at his cost, to kiss his hands, and to cover him with prayers and blessings. Not a few of them were even ready to embrace Anselm’s creed;[1663] but proselytism among his soldiers formed no part of the policy of the conqueror of Sicily. Count Roger was ready enough to extend the territorial bounds of Christendom by his sword; Count Roger forbids conversions. but he found, as his great-grandson found after him, that in war no followers were to be trusted like the misbelievers. Once enlisted in his service, they had no motive to forsake him for any other Christian leader, while they had no hope of restoring the supremacy of their own faith. With them too neither Clement nor Urban, nor any votary of Clement or Urban, had any weight. So useful a class of warriors was not to be lessened in number. Whatever might be his missionary zeal at Palermo or Syracuse, Count Roger allowed no conversions in the camp before Capua. The men who were ready to hearken to Anselm’s teaching had to turn away at the bidding of their temporal lord, and the father of Christian theology was forbidden the rare glory of winning willing proselytes to the Christian faith among the votaries of Islam.[1664]
Anselm wishes to resign the archbishopric. Meanwhile the tales of William’s misdoings in Normandy and England were brought in day by day. The heart of Anselm was moved ever more and more; he saw that, come what might, he and such a king could never agree; the only course for him was to cast aside the grievous burthen and responsibility of his archbishopric. He earnestly craved the Pontiff’s leave to resign it into his hands.[1665] Urban was far too wary for this. Urban forbids him. He enjoined Anselm, by virtue of holy obedience, to do no such thing. The King, in his tyranny, might seize his temporalities and might keep him out of the land; but in the eye of the Church he remained none the less the Archbishop of the English kingdom, with his power of binding and loosing as strong as ever.[1666] Anselm was not only not to give up his office; he was to make a point of always appearing with the full badges of his office.[1667] Even now Anselm seems to have been in some difficulties how to reconcile his two duties to God and to Cæsar, difficulties which he would doubtless have got rid of altogether by resigning the archbishopric.[1668] But he submits to the Pontiff’s will, and he is bidden to meet him again at Bari, where judgement will be given in the matter of the King of the English and of all others who interfere with the liberties of the Church.[1669]