William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE CHARTER OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR TO HYDE ABBEY

Even in 1066 the English church still retained distinct features of the tribal organisation which it had inherited from the century of the conversion. Its dioceses in general represented Heptarchic kingdoms, and the uncertainty of their boundaries is here and there definitely traceable to the uncertain limits of the primitive tribes of which, they were the ecclesiastical equivalents. The residences of half the English bishops of the eleventh century were still fixed, like those of their seventh-century predecessors, in remote villages; “places of retirement rather than centres of activity,” as they have well been called. The number of dioceses was very small in proportion to the population and area of the land, and it tended to decrease; Edward the Confessor had recently united the sees of Cornwall and Devon, under the single bishop of Exeter. Within his diocese each bishop enjoyed an independence of archiepiscopal supervision, the like of which was unknown to his continental fellows; the canonical authority of the archbishops was in abeyance, and in 1070 it was still an open question whether the sees of Dorchester, Lichfield, and Worcester, which represented nearly a third of England, belonged to the province of Canterbury or of York. The smaller territorial units of ecclesiastical government, the archdeaconry and rural deanery, are hardly to be traced in England before the Conquest, and the chapters in the several dioceses varied indefinitely in point of organisation.

It was not necessarily an abuse that the right of making appointments to the higher ecclesiastical offices belonged in England to the king and the Witanagemot; it was another matter that the leaders of the church were becoming more and more absorbed in secular business. A representative bishop of King Edward’s day would be a vigorous politician and man of affairs. Ealdred, archbishop of York, was sent by the king into Germany to negotiate for the return of Edgar the Etheling; Lyfing of Worcester earned the title of the “eloquent” through the part he played in the debates of the Witanagemot; Leofgar of Hereford, a militant person who caused grave scandal by continuing to wear his moustaches after his ordination, conducted campaigns against the Welsh. In Normandy, this type of prelate was rapidly becoming extinct; Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances stand out glaringly among their colleagues in 1066; but in England the circumstances of the time demanded the increasing participation of the higher clergy in state affairs. The rivalry of the great earls at Edward’s court produced, as it were, a barbarous anticipation of party government, and during the long ascendancy of the house of Godwine, ecclesiastical dignities were naturally bestowed on men who could make themselves politically useful to their patron. Curiously enough, the one force which operated to check the secularisation of the English episcopate was the personal character of King Edward. His foreign tendencies found full play here, and the alien clerks of his chapel whom he appointed to bishoprics came to form a distinct group, to which may be traced the beginnings of ecclesiastical reform in England. For a short time the highest office in the English church was held, in the person of the unlucky Robert of Jumièges, by a Norman monk in close touch with the Cluniac school of ecclesiastical reformers, who seems to have tried, during his brief period of rule, to raise the standard of learning among the clergy of his diocese. Robert fell before he could do much in this direction, but the foreign influences which were beginning to play upon the English church did not cease with his expulsion. Here and there, during Edward’s later years, native prelates were to be found who recognised that much was amiss with the church, and followed foreign models in their attempts at reform; Ealdred of York tried to impose the strict rule of Chrodegang of Metz upon his canons of York, Ripon, Beverley, and Southwell, the four greatest churches of Northern England. But individual bishops could not go far enough in the work of reform, and their efforts seem to have met with little sympathy from the majority of their colleagues.

To a foreign observer, nothing in the English church would seem more anomalous than the character of its ecclesiastical jurisdiction. There existed, indeed, in the law books of successive kings, a vast mass of ecclesiastical law; it was in the administration of this law that England parted company with continental usage. In England the bishop with the earl presided over the assembly of thegns, freemen, and priests which constituted the shire court, and the local courts of shire and hundred had a wide competence over matters which, on the continent, would have been referred to a specifically ecclesiastical tribunal. The bishop seems to have possessed an exclusive jurisdiction over the professional misdoings of his clergy, and the degradation of a criminous clerk, the necessary preliminary to his punishment by the lay authority, was pronounced by clerical judges, but all other matters of ecclesiastical interest fell within the province of the local assemblies. Ecclesiastical and secular laws were promulgated by the same authority and administered by the same courts, nor does the church as a whole seem to have possessed any organ by means of which collective opinion might be given upon matters of general importance. No great councils of the church, such as those of which Bede tells us, can be traced in the Confessor’s reign, nor, indeed, for nearly two centuries before his accession. The church council had been absorbed by the Witanagemot.

To all the greater movements which were agitating the religious life of the continent in the eleventh century—the Cluniac revival, the hierarchical claims of the papacy—the English church as a whole remained serenely oblivious. Its relations with the papacy were naturally very intermittent, and when a native prelate visited the Holy See, he might expect to hear strong words about plurality and simony from the Pope. With Stigand the papacy could hold no intercourse, but, despite all the fulminations of successive Popes, Stigand continued for eighteen years to draw the revenues of his sees of Canterbury and Winchester, and other prelates rivalled him in his offences of plurality, whatever scruples they might feel about his canonical position as archbishop. Ealdred of York had once administered three bishoprics and an abbey at the same time. The ecclesiastical misdemeanours of a party among the higher clergy would have been a minor evil, had it not coincided with the general abeyance of learning and efficiency among their subordinates. We know very little about the parish priest of the Confessor’s day, but what is known does not dispose us to regard him as an instrument of much value for the civilisation of his neighbours. In the great majority of cases, he seems to have been a rustic, married like his parishioners, joining with them in the agricultural work of the village, and differing from them only in the fact of his ordination, and in possessing such a knowledge of the rudiments of Latin as would enable him to recite the services of the church. The energy with which the bishops who followed the Conquest laboured for the elevation of the lower clergy is sufficiently significant of what their former condition must have been. The measures which were taken to this end by the foreign reformers—the general enforcement of celibacy, for example—may not commend themselves to modern opinion, but Lanfranc and his colleagues knew where the root of the matter lay. It was only by making the church distinct from the state, by making the parish priest a being separated by the clearest distinctions from his lay brother, that the church could begin to exercise its rightful influence upon the secular life of the nation.

GAMEL SON OF ORME’S SUNDIAL
FROM A SHORT ACCOUNT OF SAINT GREGORY’S MINSTER, KIRKDALE, BY REV. F. W. POWELL, VICAR. THE TRANSLATION IS AS FOLLOWS:

“ORM GAMAL’S SON BOUGHT S. GREGORY’S MINSTER WHEN IT WAS ALL BROKEN DOWN AND FALLEN AND HE LET IT BE MADE ANEW FROM THE GROUND TO CHRIST AND S. GREGORY, IN EDWARD’S DAYS, THE KING, AND IN TOSTI’S DAYS, THE EARL.”

THE CENTRAL PANEL HAS ON THE DIAL—