We have already remarked that to the men of the eleventh century, ecclesiastical reform implied the general enforcement of clerical celibacy. The Winchester Council of 1072 had issued a decree against unchaste clerks, but the matter was not taken up in detail for four years more, and the settlement which was then arrived at was much more lenient to the adherents of the old order than might have been expected. It made a distinction between the two classes of the secular clergy. All clerks who were members of any religious establishment, whether a cathedral chapter, or college of secular canons, were to live celibate for the future. The treatment applied to the upland clergy was summary. It would have been a hopeless task to force the celibate life upon the whole parochial clergy of England, but steps could be taken to secure that the married priest would become an extinct species in the course of the next generation. Accordingly, parish priests who were married at the time might continue to live with their wives, but all subsequent clerical marriage was absolutely forbidden, and the bishops were enjoined to ordain no man who had not previously made definite profession of celibacy. In all this Lanfranc was evidently anxious to pass no decree which could not be carried into immediate execution, even if this policy involved inevitable delay before the English clergy in this great respect were brought into line with their continental brethren. The next century had well begun before the native clergy as a whole had been reduced to acceptance of the celibate rule.
The monastic revival which followed the Conquest told in the same direction. In the mere foundation of religious houses, the Conqueror’s reign cannot claim a high place. Such monasteries as derive their origin from this period were for the most part affiliated to some continental establishment. The Conqueror’s own abbey of St. Martin of the Place of Battle was founded as a colony from Marmoutier, though it soon won complete autonomy from the jurisdiction of the parent house. It was a noteworthy event when in 1076 William de Warenne founded at Lewes the first Cluniac priory in England, although it does not appear that any other house of this order had arisen in this country before 1087. In monastic history the interest of the Conqueror’s reign centres round the old independent Benedictine monasteries of England, and their reform under the administration of abbots imported from the continent. Here there was much work to be done; not only in regard to the tightening of monastic discipline, but also in the accommodation of these ancient houses, with their wide lands and large dependent populations, to the new conditions of society which were the result of the Conquest. Knight service had to be provided for; the property of the monastery had to be organised to enable it to bear the secular burdens which the Conqueror’s policy imposed; foreign abbots were at times glad to rely upon the legal knowledge which native monks could bring to bear upon the intricacies of the prevailing system of land tenure. The Conqueror’s abbots were often men of affairs, rather than saints; their work was here and there misunderstood by the monks over whom they ruled, yet it cannot be doubted that a stricter discipline, a more efficient discharge of monastic offices, a higher conception of monastic life, were the results of their government.
The influence of their work was not confined within monastic walls. In the more accurate differentiation of monastic duties which they introduced, they were not unmindful of the claims of the monastery school. Very gradually the schools of such houses as St. Albans and Malmesbury came to affect the mass of the native clergy. And the process was quickened by the control which the monasteries possessed over a considerable proportion of the parish churches of the country. The grant of a village to an abbey meant that its church would be served by a priest appointed by the abbot, and in Norman times no baron would found a religious house without granting to it a number of the churches situate upon his fief. Already in 1066 the several monasteries of England possessed a large amount of patronage; and the Norman abbots of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were not slow to employ the influence they possessed in this way for the elevation of the native clergy.
Of course, there is another side to this picture. In the little world of the monastery, as in the wide world of the state, it was the character of the ruling man which determined whether the ascendancy of continental ideas should make for good or evil. The autocracy of the abbot might upon occasion degenerate into sheer tyranny: there is the classical instance of Thurstan of Glastonbury, who turned a body of men-at-arms upon his monks because they resisted his introduction of the Ambrosian method of chanting the services.[[292]] It was an easy matter for an abbot to use the lands of his church as a means of providing for his needy kinsmen in Normandy[[293]]; the pious founder in the next generation would often explicitly guard against the unnecessary creation of knights’ fees on the monastic estates. An abbot, careless of his responsibilities, might neglect to provide for the service of the village churches affiliated to his house; and it would be difficult to call him to account for this. But, judging from the evidence which we possess, we can only conclude that the church in England did actually escape most of the evils which might have resulted from the superposition of a new spiritual aristocracy. The bad cases of which we have information are very clearly exceptions, thrown into especial prominence on this very account.
And against the dangers we have just indicated we have to set the undoubted fact that with the Norman Conquest the English church passes at once from a period of stagnation to a period of exuberant activity. In the conduct of the religious life, in learning and architecture, in all that followed from intimate association with the culture and spiritual ideals of the continent, the reign of the Conqueror and the primacy of Lanfranc fittingly inaugurate the splendid history of the medieval church of England. And it is only fair for us to attribute the credit for this result in large measure to King William himself. Let it be granted that the actual work of reform was done by the bishops and abbots of England under the guidance of Lanfranc; there will still remain the fact that the Conqueror chose as his spiritual associates men who were both willing and able to carry the work of reform into effect. Nothing would have been easier than for King William, coming in as he did by conquest, to treat the English church as the lawful spoils of war. Its degradation under the rule of feudal prelates of the type of Geoffrey of Coutances would have made for, rather than against, his secular autocracy. Had he reduced the church to impotence he would have spared his successors many an evil day. But, confident that he himself would always be supreme in church as well as state, he was content to entrust its guidance to the best and strongest men of whom he knew, and if he foresaw the dangers of the future he left their avoidance to those who came after him.
No detailed account can be given here of the prelates whom the Conqueror appointed to ecclesiastical office in England. In point of origin they were a very heterogeneous class of men. Some of them were monks from the great abbeys of Normandy; Gundulf of Rochester came from Caen, Remigius of Dorchester from Fécamp; others, such as Robert of Hereford, were of Lotharingian extraction. Under the Conqueror, as under his successors, service at the royal court was a ready road to ecclesiastical promotion; nor were the clerks of the king’s chapel the least worthy of the new prelates. Osmund of Salisbury, who attained to ultimate canonisation, had been chancellor from 1072 to 1077. But a question immediately presents itself as to the relations which existed between these foreign lords of the church and the Englishmen, clerk and lay, over whom they ruled. Learned and zealous they might be, and yet, at the same time, remain entirely out of touch with the native population of England. To presuppose this, however, would be a great injustice to the new prelates. The very diversity of their origin prevented them from sharing the racial pride of the lay nobility, and their position as servants of a universal church told in the same direction. They learned the English language, and some at least among them preached to the country folk in the vernacular. They preserved the cult of the native saints, though they criticised with good reason the grounds on which certain kings and prelates had received canonisation, and in most dioceses they retained without modification the forms of ritual which had been developed by the Anglo-Saxon church. Among all the forces which made for the assimilation of Englishman to Norman in the century following the Conquest the work of King William’s bishops and abbots must certainly hold a high place.
The friendly relations which had existed between William and the Curia during the pontificate of Alexander II. were not interrupted immediately by the accession of Hildebrand, in 1073, but there soon appeared ominous symptoms of coming strife. It was no longer a matter of vital importance for William to retain the favour of the papacy—he was now the undisputed master of England and Normandy alike. Hildebrand, a man of genius, in whose passionate character an inherent hatred of compromise clashes with a statesmanlike recognition of the demands of practical expediency, could not be expected to refrain from advancing the ecclesiastical claims to the furtherance of which his whole soul was devoted. The Conqueror had indeed gone far in the work of reform, but neither in England nor in Normandy did he show any intention of conforming to the Hildebrandine conception of the model relationship which should exist between church and state. Of his own will he appointed his bishops and abbots, and they in turn paid him homage for their temporal possessions; he controlled at pleasure the intercourse between his prelates and the Holy See. Herein lay abundant materials for a quarrel; the wonder is that it did not break out for six years after Hildebrand’s succession.
The immediate cause of the outbreak was the abstention of the English and Norman bishops from attendance at the general synods of the church which Hildebrand convened at Rome during these years. Lanfranc was the chief offender in this respect, but before long Hildebrand came to recognise that Lanfranc was only acting in obedience to his master’s orders, and anger at the discovery drove the Pope to take the offensive against his former ally. Lanfranc was peremptorily summoned to Rome; the archbishop-elect of Rouen, William Bona Anima, was refused the papal confirmation, and Archbishop Gebuin of Lyons was given an extraordinary commission as primate of the provinces of Rouen, Sens, and Tours; a step which at once destroyed the ecclesiastical autonomy of Normandy. William’s reply to this attack was characteristic of the man. He was not without personal friends at the papal court, and without yielding his ground in the slightest in regard to the main matter in dispute he contrived to pacify the angry Pope by protestations of his unaltered devotion to the Holy See. Gregory bided his time; Archbishop Gebuin’s primacy came to nothing. William of Rouen received the pallium, and shortly after these events the Pope is found writing an admonitory letter to Robert of Normandy, then in exile. The storm had in fact blown over, but a greater crisis was close at hand.
It is quite possible that Gregory considered that he had won a diplomatic victory in the recent correspondence. He had not, it is true, carried his main point, but he had drawn from the king of England a notable expression of personal respect, and it is possible that this emboldened him shortly afterwards to make a direct demand upon William’s allegiance. In the course of 1080, to adopt the most probable date, Gregory sent his legate Hubert to William with a demand that the latter should take an oath of fealty to the Pope, and should provide for the more punctual payment of the tribute of Peter’s Pence due from England. In making the latter demand Hildebrand was only claiming his rights; from ancient time Peter’s Pence had been sent to Rome from England, and the Conqueror admitted his obligation in the matter. But the claim of fealty stood on a different footing. William, indeed, cannot have been unprepared for it; it was inevitable that sooner or later the papacy would endeavour to obtain a recognition, in the sphere of politics, of its support of the Norman claims on England in 1066. None the less, it was entirely inadmissible from William’s standpoint. So far as our evidence goes, it is certain that William had made no promise of feudal allegiance in 1066[[294]]; for him, as indeed for Alexander II., the papacy had already reaped its reward in the ecclesiastical sphere, in the power of initiating the reform of the English church, in the more intimate connection established between Rome and England. Alexander II. had been willing to subordinate all questions of spiritual politics to the more pressing needs of ecclesiastical reform, and Gregory had hitherto followed his predecessor’s lead; nor on the present occasion did he do more than assert a claim of the recognition of which he can have held but slender hopes. For William repudiated the Pope’s demand outright, asserting that none of his predecessors had ever sworn fealty to any former Pope, nor had he ever promised to do the like. We have no information as to the reception which William’s answer met at Rome; but, whatever resentment he may have felt, Gregory was debarred by circumstances from taking offensive action against the king of England. In the very year of this correspondence, Gregory found himself confronted by an anti-pope, nominated by the emperor; and from this time onward, the Pope’s difficulties on the continent increased, up to the hour of his death in exile five years later. Fortune continued true to William, even in his ecclesiastical relations.
There is no need to trace in detail the history of William’s dealings with the church during his last years. In England the work of reform, well begun in the previous decade, continued without interruption under the guidance of the new prelates. There is some evidence, indeed, that towards the close of William’s reign the English clergy were in advance of their Norman brethren in strictness of life and regard for canonical rule; at least in 1080, at the Synod of Lillebonne,[[295]] the king found it necessary to assume for himself the jurisdiction over the grosser offences of the clergy, on the ground that the Norman bishops had been remiss in their prosecution. But in England the leaders of the church seem to have enjoyed the king’s confidence to the last, and their reforming zeal needed no royal intervention. The work of Dunstan and Oswald, frustrated at the time by unkind circumstances, had at last, under stranger conditions than any they might conceive, reached its fulfilment.