“The battle of freedom is never done and the field never quiet,” and while ever sun and moon endure and man seeks to dominate his neighbour, so long in England shall men and women be found to resist such dominance. For “to meet such troubles and overcome them, or to die in strife with them—this is a great part of a man’s life.”
The End.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “By the mouth of the clergy spoke the voice of the helpless, defenceless multitudes who shared with them in the misery of living in a time when law was the feeblest and most untrustworthy stay of right, and men held everything at the mercy of masters, who had many desires and less scruples, were quickly and fiercely quarrelsome, impatient of control, superiority and quiet, and simply indifferent to the suffering, the fear, the waste that make bitter the days when society is enslaved to the terrible fascination of the sword.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
“Unrestrained by religion, by principle or by policy, with no family interests to limit his greed, extravagance and hatred of his kind, a foul incarnation of selfishness in its most abhorrent form, the enemy of God and man, William Rufus gave to England and Christendom a pattern of absolutism.”—Stubbs, Constitutional History. Vol. I.
[2] No Archbishop of Canterbury has received the pallium since Cranmer, but the sign of it remains in the archiepiscopal arms of Canterbury.
[3] “No one in those days imagined Christianity without Christendom, and Christendom without a Pope: and all these bishops understood exactly as Anselm did the favourite papal text, ‘Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church.’ Nobody in those days doubted the divine authority of the Pope.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
[4] “The boldness of Anselm’s attitude not only broke the tradition of ecclesiastical servitude, but infused through the nation at large a new spirit of independence.”—J. R. Green.
[5] “When in Anglo-Norman times you speak of the ‘King’s Court,’ it is only a phrase for the king’s despotism.”—Sir F. Palgrave, History of Normandy and England.
[6] “The see of St. Peter was the acknowledged constitutional centre of spiritual law in the West.... It was looked upon as the guide and regulator of teaching, the tribunal and court from which issued the oracles of right and discipline, the judgment seat to which an appeal was open to all, and which gave sentence on wrong and vice without fear or favour, without respect of persons, even the highest and the mightiest.... If ever there was a time when the popes honestly endeavoured to carry out the idea of their office, it was just at this period of the Middle Ages. They attempted to erect an independent throne of truth and justice above the passions and the force which reigned in the world around.”—Church, Saint Anselm.