The amount of work which he had got through by that time must have been quite as great as in the busiest days of his chancellorship. The day’s occupations ostensibly began about the hour of tierce, when the archbishop came forth from his chamber and went either to hear or to celebrate mass,[37] while a breakfast was given at his expense to a hundred persons who were called his “poor prebendaries.”[38] After mass he proceeded to his audience-chamber and there chiefly remained till the hour of nones, occupied in hearing suits and administering justice.[39] Nones were followed by dinner,[40] after which the primate shut himself up in his own apartments with his eruditi[41] and spent the rest of the day with them in business or study, interrupted only by the religious duties of the canonical hours, and sometimes by a little needful repose,[42] for his night’s rest was of the briefest. At cock-crow he rose for prime; immediately afterwards there were brought in to him secretly, under cover of the darkness, thirteen poor persons whose feet he washed and to whom he ministered at table with the utmost devotion and humility,[43] clad only in a hair-shirt which from the day of his consecration he always wore beneath the gorgeous robes in which he appeared in public.[44] He then returned to his bed, but only for a very short time; long before any one else was astir he was again up and doing, in company with one specially favoured disciple—the one who tells the tale, Herbert of Bosham. In the calm silent hours of dawn, while twelve other poor persons received a secret meal and had their feet washed by the primate’s almoner in his stead, the two friends sat eagerly searching the Scriptures together, till the archbishop chose to be left alone[45] for meditation and confession, scourging and prayer,[46] in which he remained absorbed until the hour of tierce called him forth to his duties in the world.[47]

He was feverishly anxious to lose no opportunity of making up for his long neglect of the Scriptural and theological studies befitting his sacred calling. He openly confessed his grievous inferiority in this respect to many of his own clerks, and put himself under their teaching with child-like simplicity and earnestness. The one whom he specially chose for monitor and guide, Herbert of Bosham, was a man in whom, despite his immeasurable inferiority, one can yet see something of a temper sufficiently akin to that of Thomas himself to account for their mutual attraction, and perhaps for some of their joint errors. As they rode from London to Canterbury on the morrow of the primate’s election he had drawn Herbert aside and laid upon him a special charge to watch with careful eyes over his conduct as archbishop, and tell him without stint or scruple whatever he saw amiss in it or heard criticized by others.[48] Herbert, though he worshipped his primate with a perfect hero-worship, never hesitated to fulfil this injunction to the letter as far as his lights would permit; but unluckily his zeal was even less tempered by discretion than that of Thomas himself. He was a far less safe guide in the practical affairs of life than in the intricate paths of abstract and mystical interpretation of Holy Writ in which he and Thomas delighted to roam together. Often, when no other quiet time could be found, the archbishop would turn his horse aside as they travelled along the road, beckon to his friend, draw out a book from its hiding-place in one of his wide sleeves, and plunge into an eager discussion of its contents as they ambled slowly on.[49] When at Canterbury, his greatest pleasure was to betake himself to the cloister and sit reading like a lowly monk in one of its quiet nooks.[50]

But the eruditi of Thomas, like the disciples of Theobald, were the confidants and the sharers of far more than his literary and doctrinal studies. It was in those evening hours which he spent in their midst, secluded from all outside interruption, that the plans of Church reform and Church revival, sketched long ago by other hands in the Curia Theobaldi, assumed a shape which might perhaps have startled Theobald himself. As the weeks wore quickly away from Trinity to Ember-tide, the new primate set himself to grapple at once with the ecclesiastical abuses of the time in the persons of his first candidates for ordination. On his theory the remedy for these abuses lay in the hands of the bishops, and especially of the metropolitans, who fostered simony, worldliness and immorality among the clergy by the facility with which they admitted unqualified persons into high orders, thus filling the ranks of the priesthood with unworthy, ignorant and needy clerks, who either traded upon their sacred profession as a means to secular advancement, or disgraced it by the idle wanderings and unbecoming shifts to which the lack of fit employment drove them to resort for a living. He was determined that no favour or persuasion should ever induce him to ordain any man whom he did not know to be of saintly life and ample learning, and provided with a benefice sufficient to furnish him with occupation and maintenance; and he proclaimed and acted upon his determination with the zeal of one who, as he openly avowed, felt that he was himself the most glaring example of the evils resulting from a less stringent system of discipline.[51]

His next undertaking was one which almost every new-made prelate in any degree alive to the rights and duties of his office found it needful to begin as soon as possible: the recovery of the alienated property of his see. Gilbert Foliot, the model English bishop of the day, had no sooner been consecrated than he wrote to beg the Pope’s support in this important and troublesome matter.[52] It may well be that even fourteen years later the metropolitan see had not yet received full restitution for the spoliations of the anarchy. Thomas however set to work in the most sweeping fashion, boldly laying claim to every estate which he could find to have been granted away by his predecessors on grounds which did not satisfy his exalted ideas of ecclesiastical right, or on terms which he held detrimental to the interest and dignity of his church, and enforcing his claims without respect of persons; summarily turning out those who held the archiepiscopal manors in ferm,[53] disputing with the earl of Clare for jurisdiction over the castle and district of Tunbridge, and reclaiming, on the strength of a charter of the Conqueror, the custody of Rochester castle from the Crown itself. Such a course naturally stirred up for him a crowd of enemies, and increased the jealousy, suspicion and resentment which his new position and altered mode of life had already excited among the companions and rivals of his earlier days. The archbishop however was still, like the chancellor, protected against them by the shield of the royal favour; they could only work against him by working upon the mind of Henry. One by one they carried over sea their complaints of the wrongs which they had suffered, or with which they were threatened, at the primate’s hands;[54] they reported all his daily doings and interpreted them in the worst sense:—his strictness of life was superstition, his zeal for justice was cruelty, his care for his church avarice, his pontifical splendour pride, his vigour rashness and self-conceit:[55]—if the king did not look to it speedily, he would find his laws and constitutions set at naught, his regal dignity trodden under foot, and himself and his heirs reduced to mere cyphers dependent on the will and pleasure of the archbishop of Canterbury.[56]