“THIS IS DAY’S SUN MARKER
AT EVERY TIME.”
AND AT THE FOOT—
“AND HAWARTH ME WROUGHT AND BRAND, PRIESTS”
Political circumstances delayed the beginnings of ecclesiastical reform for more than three years after the battle of Hastings had placed the destinies of the English church in Norman hands. While the Conqueror was fighting at Stafford and York, he could not be presiding over synods at Winchester and London. No steps, therefore, were taken in this question before 1070, when the fall of Chester destroyed the last chance of a successful English rising, and made it no longer expedient for William to be complaisant to Stigand and the nationalist party in the English episcopate. But in 1070 the work was begun in earnest under the immediate sanction of the Pope, expressed in the legation of two cardinal priests who visited England in that year. There could be little doubt what their first step would be; and when Stigand was formally arraigned for holding the sees of Winchester and Canterbury in plurality, usurping the pallium of his predecessor, Robert, and receiving his own pallium from the schismatic Benedict X., he had no defence to offer beyond declamation against the good faith of the king. Three other bishops fell at or about the same time; Ethelmer, brother of Stigand, and bishop of East Anglia, Ethelwine, bishop of Durham, and Ethelric, bishop of Selsey. In regard to none of these last bishops are the grounds on which their deposition was based at all certain; and in the case of Ethelric, an aged man who was famed for his vast knowledge of Anglo-Saxon law, the Pope himself was uneasy about the point, and a correspondence went on for some time between him and Lanfranc on the subject. But it is a noteworthy fact that these four prelates are the only bishops deposed during the whole of the Conqueror’s reign. Nothing was further from William’s purpose than any wholesale clearance of the native episcopate. He was King Edward’s heir, and he wished, therefore, to retain King Edward’s bishops in office, so far as this was consistent with the designs of his ally the Pope. On the other hand, William was no less determined to fill all vacancies when they occurred in the course of nature with continental priests. Herein he and the Pope were in complete harmony. It was only by this means that continental culture and ideas of church government could be introduced into England, and William trusted in his own strength to repress any inconvenient tendencies which might arise from the ultramontane ideals of his nominees.
The deposition of Stigand meant the elevation of Lanfranc to the archbishopric of Canterbury. It is probable that the Pope would have preferred to attach him to the College of Cardinals, but William was determined to place his old friend at the head of the English church, and Alexander II. gave way. York, vacant through the death of Ealdred in 1069, was given to Thomas, treasurer of Bayeux, protégé of Odo, bishop of that see, and a man of vast and cosmopolitan learning. Almost immediately after his appointment a fierce dispute broke out between him and Lanfranc. The dispute in question was twofold—partly referring to the boundaries of the two provinces, but also raising the more important question whether the two English archbishops should possess co-ordinate rank or whether the archbishop of York should be compelled to take an oath of obedience to the primate of Canterbury. In a council held at Winchester in 1072 both questions were settled in favour of Canterbury. The dioceses of Lichfield, Worcester, and Dorchester were assigned to the latter provinces, and Lanfranc—partly by arousing William’s fears as to the political inexpediency of an independent archbishop of York, partly by the skilful forgery of relevant documents—brought it about that the northern archbishopric was formally declared subordinate to that of Canterbury. In ecclesiastical, as well as secular matters, William had small respect for the particularism of Northumbria.
The council which decided this matter was only one of a series of similar assemblies convened during the archiepiscopate of Lanfranc. The first of the series had already been held in 1070, when Wulfstan, the unlearned but saintly bishop of Worcester, was arraigned pro defectu scientiæ. He was saved from imminent deposition partly by his piety, partly by his frank and early acceptance of the Norman rule; and he retained his see until his death in 1094. In 1075 the third council of the series proceeded to deal with one of the greatest anomalies presented by the English church, and raised the whole question of episcopal residence. In accordance with its decrees, the see of Lichfield was translated to Chester, that of Selsey to Chichester, and that of Sherborne to Old Salisbury. Shortly afterwards, the seat of the east midland diocese of Dorchester was transferred to Lincoln; and in 1078 Bishop Herbert of Elmham, after an abortive attempt to gain possession of Bury St. Edmund’s, removed his residence to Thetford, the second town in Norfolk. In all these changes the attempt was made to follow the continental practice by which a bishop would normally reside in the chief town of his diocese. But new episcopal seats implied new cathedral churches, and the Conqueror’s reign witnessed a notable augmentation of church revenues,[[289]] expressed in grants of land, the extent of which can be ascertained from the evidence of Domesday Book. Here and there are traces of a reorganisation of church property, and of its appropriation to special purposes; all of which enabled the new bishops to support the strain incurred by their great building activities. By 1087 new cathedrals had been begun in seven out of fifteen dioceses.
The church councils which supplied the means through which the king and primate carried their ideas of ecclesiastical reform into effect were bodies of a somewhat anomalous constitution. In the Confessor’s day the Witanagemot had treated indifferently of sacred and secular law, but its competence in religious matters did not descend unbroken to its feudal representative, the Commune Concilium. In the Conqueror’s reign the church council is becoming differentiated from the assembly of lay barons, but the process is not yet complete. The session of the church council would normally coincide in point of place and time with a meeting of the Commune Concilium; no ecclesiastical decree was valid until it had received the king’s sanction, and the king and his lay barons joined the assembly, although they took no active part in its deliberations. There was, indeed, small necessity for their presence, and in two of the more important councils of William’s reign, at London in 1075 and at Gloucester in 1085 the spiritualty held a session of their own apart from the meeting of the Commune Concilium. In any case the spiritual decrees were promulgated upon the authority of the archbishop and prelates, although the royal word was necessary for their reception as law.
No piece of ecclesiastical legislation passed during this time had wider consequences than the famous decree which limited the competence of the shire and hundred courts in regard to matters pertaining to religion.[[290]] This law has only come down to us in the form of a royal writ addressed to the officers and men of the shire court, so that its exact date is uncertain. But intrinsically it is likely enough that the question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction would be one of the first matters to which William and Lanfranc would turn their hands, and the principle implied in the writ had already been recognised by all the states of the continent. According to this document no person of ecclesiastical status might be tried before the hundred court, nor might this assembly any longer possess jurisdiction over cases involving questions of spiritual law, even when laymen were the parties concerned. All these matters were reserved to the exclusive jurisdiction of the bishops and their archdeacons, and in this way room was prepared in England for the reception of the canon law of the church.[[291]] Important as it was for the subsequent fortunes of the church, this decree was perhaps of even greater importance for its influence upon the development of secular law. The canons of the church, in the shape which they assumed at the hands of Gratian in the next generation, were to set before lay legislators the example of a codified body of law, aiming at logical consistency and inherent reason; a body very different from the collection of isolated enactments which the English church of the eleventh century inherited from the Witanagemots of Alfred and Edgar. We cannot here trace the way in which the efforts of the great doctors of the canon law were to react upon the work of their secular contemporaries; but the fact of such influence is certain, and the next century witnessed its abundant manifestation.
The transference of ecclesiastical causes from the sphere of the folk law to that of the canons of the church meant that the Pope would in time acquire, in fact, what no doubt he would already claim in theory—the legal sovereignty of the church in England. That William recognised this is certain, and he was determined that the fact should in no way invalidate the ecclesiastical prerogatives which he already enjoyed in Normandy, and which in regard to England he claimed as King Edward’s heir. Contemporary churchmen say this too, and the key to William’s relations with the Pope is given in the three resolutions which Eadmer in the next generation ascribes to him. No Pope should be recognised in England, no papal letters should be received, and no tenant-in-chief excommunicated without his consent. In short, William was prepared to make concessions to the ecclesiastical ideas of his clerical friends only in so far as they might tend to the more efficient discharge by the church of its spiritual function. This was, of course, a compromise, and no very satisfactory one; it led immediately to strained relations between William himself and Hildebrand, it was the direct cause of the quarrel between William Rufus and Anselm, and it was indirectly responsible for the greater struggle which raged between Henry of Anjou and Becket. On one point, however, king and papacy were in perfect accord, and it was this fact which prevented their difference of opinion upon higher matters of ecclesiastical policy from becoming acute during the Conqueror’s lifetime. Both parties were agreed upon the imperative necessity of reforming the mass of the English clergy in morals and learning, and here at least the Conqueror’s work was permanent and consonant with the strictest ecclesiastical ideas of the time.