William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

Denier of Philip I. of France

CHAPTER X
WILLIAM AND THE CHURCH

Up to the present we have only dealt with the ecclesiastical relations of William the Conqueror in so far as they have directly affected political issues. But the subject has a unity of its own, quite apart from its bearing upon the course of war or diplomacy, and no aspect of the Conqueror’s work is known to us in greater detail. It may be added that no aspect of the Conqueror’s work is more illustrative of the general character of his government, nor of greater significance for the future history. For four centuries and a half the development of the church in England followed the lines which he had indicated.[^[287]]

But the church in Normandy was William’s first concern, and some appreciation of his work here is necessary to an understanding of the tendencies which governed his ecclesiastical policy in England. Broadly stated, William’s relations with the church in Normandy and England alike were governed by two main ideas. He was beyond all doubt sincerely anxious for the reform of the church, as he would have understood the phrase—the extension and stricter observance of the monastic life, the improvement of the learning and morals of the secular clergy, the development of a specific ecclesiastical law. But he was no less determined that, at all hazards, the church in his dominions should be subordinate to the state, and his enforcement of this principle ultimately threw him into opposition to the very party in the church which was most sympathetic to his plans of ecclesiastical reform. Between Hildebrand claiming in definite words that the head of the church was the lord of the world, and William asserting in unmistakable acts that the king of England was over all persons in all causes, as well ecclesiastical as temporal, through his dominions supreme, there were certain to be differences of opinion. But the two great men kept the peace for a surprising length of time, and it was not until ten years before William’s death that serious discord arose between him and the Curia in regard to the question of church government.

In this matter, indeed, William was but maintaining prerogatives which he had inherited from his predecessors, and which were simultaneously being vindicated by the other princes of his time. We have already remarked on the intimate connection of church and state which prevailed in Normandy at the beginning of the eleventh century, in relation to its bearing upon the general absolutism enjoyed by the duke. But the fact has a wider significance as governing the whole character of ecclesiastical life in the duchy. The rights of patronage which the duke possessed, his intervention in the process of ecclesiastical legislation, his power of deposing prelates who had fallen under his displeasure, not only forbade the autonomy of the church, they made its spiritual welfare as well as its professional efficiency essentially dependent upon the personal character of its secular head. Under these conditions, there was scanty room for the growth of ultramontane ideas among the Norman clergy; and such influence as the papacy exercised in Normandy before 1066 at least was due much more to traditional reverence for the Holy See, and to occasional respect for the character of its individual occupants, than to any recognition of the legal sovereignty of the Pope in spiritual matters. William himself in the matter of his marriage had defied the papacy, and the denunciations of the Curia found but a faint response among the prelates of the Norman church.

From the ultramontane point of view this dependence of the church upon the state was a gross evil, but it was at least an evil which produced its own compensation in Normandy. The chaos which had attended the settlement of the Northmen in the tenth century had involved the whole ecclesiastical organisation of the land in utter ruin, and its restoration was entirely due to the initiative taken by the secular power. The successive dukes of Normandy, from Richard I. onward, showed astonishing zeal in the work of ecclesiastical reform.[^[288]] Their zeal, however, must have spent itself in vain if their success had been dependent upon the co-operation of the Norman clergy; the decay of the church in Normandy had gone too far to permit of its being reformed from within. The reforming energy which makes the eleventh century a brilliant period in French ecclesiastical history was concentrated at this time in the great abbeys of Flanders and Burgundy, whose inmates, however, were fully competent, and for the most part willing, to undertake the restoration of ecclesiastical order in Normandy. From this quarter, and in particular from the abbey of Cluny, monks were imported into the duchy by Dukes Richard I. and II., and under their guidance the reform of the Norman church was undertaken according to the highest monastic ideal of the time. Very gradually, but with ever increasing strength, the influence of the foreign reformers gained more and more control over every rank in the Norman hierarchy. The higher clergy, who at first resisted the movement, became transformed into its champions as the result of the judicious appointments made by successive dukes. Even the upland clergy, whose invincible ignorance had aroused the anger of the earliest reformers, were attracted within the scope of the reform, partly by means of the affiliation of village churches to monasteries, but above all through the educational work performed by the schools which were among the first fruits of the monastic revival.

If the foundation of new monasteries may be taken as evidence, the process of expansion and reform went on unchecked throughout the stormy minority of William the Conqueror. A period of feudal anarchy was not necessarily inimical to the ultimate interests of the church. Amid the disorder and oppression of secular life the church might still display the example of a society founded on law and discipline, it might in numberless individual cases protect the weak from gratuitous injury, and it certainly might hope to emerge from the chaos with wider influence and augmented revenues. The average baron was very willing to atone for his misdeeds by the foundation of a new religious house, or by benefactions to an old one, and the immortal church had time on its side. In Normandy, at least, the disorder of William’s minority coincided with the foundation of new monasteries in almost every diocese in the Norman church; and the promulgation of the Truce of God in 1042 gave a wide extension to the competence of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in relation to secular affairs.

With William’s victory at Val-es-dunes, the crisis was over, and for the next forty years the Norman church sailed in smooth waters. Autocratic as was William by temperament, nothing contributed more greatly to his success than his singular wisdom in the choice of his ministers in church and state, and his power of attaching them to his service by ties of personal friendship to himself. The relations between William and Lanfranc form perhaps the greatest case in point, but there were other and less famous members of the Norman hierarchy who stood on terms of personal intimacy with their master. And William was cosmopolitan in his sympathies. Men of learning and piety from every part of Christendom were entrusted by him with responsible positions in the Norman church; in 1066 nearly all the greater abbeys of Normandy were ruled by foreign monks. Cosmopolitanism was the chief note of medieval culture, and under these influences a real revival of learning may be traced in Normandy. It is well for William’s memory that this was so; but for the work of William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges, two typical representatives of the new learning, posterity would have remained in blank ignorance of the Conqueror’s rule in Normandy. But it is a matter of still greater importance that in this way Normandy was gradually becoming prepared to be the educator of England, as well as her conqueror. The surviving relics of the literary activity at this time of Normandy—mass books, theological treatises, and books of miracles, which it produced—have but little interest for the general student of history, but the important point is that they are symptoms of an intellectual life manifesting itself with vigour in the only directions which were possible to it in the early eleventh century. Not until it had been transplanted to the conquered soil of England did this intellectual life produce its greatest result, the philosophical history of William of Malmesbury, the logical narrative of Eadmer, to name only two of its manifestations; but in matters of culture, as well as in matters of policy and war, the Norman race was unconsciously equipping itself in these years for its later achievement across the Channel.

It cannot be denied that the English church stood in sore need of some such external influence. The curious blight which seemed to have settled on the secular government of England affected its religious organisation also. The English church had never really recovered from the Danish wars of Alfred’s time. It had been galvanised into fresh activity by the efforts of Dunstan and his fellow-reformers of the tenth century, but the energy they had infused scarcely outlasted their own lives, and in 1066 the church in England compares very unfavourably with the churches of the continent in all respects. It had become provincial where they were catholic; its culture was a feeble echo of the culture of the eighth century, they were striking out new methods of inquiry into the mysteries of the faith; it was becoming more and more closely assimilated to the state, they were struggling to emancipate themselves from secular control. There was ample scope in England for the work of a great ecclesiastical reformer, but the increasing secularisation of the leaders of the church rendered it unlikely that he would come from within.