“Under the rule of William the Red, law had become unlaw, and in appealing from him to the apostolic throne Anselm might deem he was appealing from mere force and fraud to the only shadow of right that was still left on earth.”—Freeman, Norman Conquest, Vol. V.
[7] “In England Anselm had stood only for right and liberty; he, the chief witness for religion and righteousness, saw all round him vice rampant, men spoiled of what was their own—justice, decency, honour trampled under foot. Law was unknown, except to ensnare and oppress. The King’s Court was the instrument of one man’s selfish and cruel will, and of the devices of a cunning and greedy minister. The natural remedies of wrong were destroyed and corrupted; the king’s peace, the king’s law, the king’s justice, to which men in those days looked for help, could only be thought of in mocking contrast to the reality. Against this energetic reign of misrule and injustice, a resistance as energetic was wanted; and to resist it was felt to be the call and bounden duty of a man in Anselm’s place. He resisted, as was the way in those days, man to man, person to person, in outright fashion and plain-spoken words. He resisted lawlessness, wickedness, oppression, corruption. When others acquiesced in the evil state, he refused; and further, he taught a lesson which England has since largely learned, though in a very different way. He taught his generation to appeal from force and arbitrary will to law. It was idle to talk of appealing to law in England; its time had not yet come.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
[8] “No discipline restrained them (the king’s attendants); they plundered, they devastated, they destroyed. What they found in the houses which they invaded and could not consume, they took to market to sell for themselves or they burnt it. If it was liquor they would bathe the feet of their horses in it or pour it on the ground. It shames me to recall the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families and the insults on their wives and daughters. And so, whenever the king’s coming was known beforehand, people fled from their houses and hid themselves and their goods, as far as they could, in the woods or wherever safety might be found.”—Eadmer.
[9] “If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king’s whom it annointed, or if the struggle had terminated in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism.”—Acton, History of Freedom in Christianity.
[10] “By the surrender of the significant ceremony of delivering the bishopric by the emblematic staff and ring, it was emphatically put on record that the spiritual powers of the bishop were not the king’s to give; the prescription of feudalism was broken.”—Church, Saint Anselm.
[11] “With regard to Thomas’ dealings with the Church, if one thing is clear it is this—that he was not in the least a man who pushed his Order at the expense of his loyalty. More than once he refused to listen to an ecclesiastical claim against the king, even when his old friend Theobald was behind it: he was perfectly impartial: he taxed churchmen as he taxed laymen, and in fact, so loyal and reasonable was he that Henry, when he made him archbishop, seems to have thought that he was wholly on his side. There were innumerable questions to be decided between Church and State. Again and again small points came up as to the appointment of this man or the other, as to the infliction or remission of a fine; and again and again Thomas decided the cause and advised the king on the merits of the case.... He was as zealous now for the State as he was for the Church afterwards. There he stood Chancellor of England; his business was to administer the laws, and he knew and did his business.”—R. H. Benson, St. Thomas of Canterbury.
[12] “The only instance which has occurred of the chancellorship being voluntarily resigned either by layman or ecclesiastic.”—Campbell, Lives of the Chancellors.
[13] “It must be held in mind that the archbisholp had on his side the Church or Canon Law, which he had sworn to obey, and certainly the law courts erred as much on the side of harshness and cruelty as those of the Church on that of foolish pity towards evil-doers.”—F. York Powell.
“We have to take ourselves back to a state of society in which a judicial trial was a tournament, and the ordeal an approved substitute for evidence, to realise what civilization owes to the Canon Law and the canonists, with their elaborate system of written law, their judicial evidence, and their written procedure.”—Rashdall, Universities of Europe during the Middle Ages.
[14] W. H. Hutton.