The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

Church
policy of the
Conqueror.

The Conquest had some very marked effects in this region of life. In the first place, it was absolutely necessary for William to have the clergy on his side; if he had not he would have nothing to form a counterpoise for the power of the barons, which was already threatening, nor would he have been able to get hold of the people. He wanted to be a national king—the protector of the national Church, the king of the English people. In the hope of securing the support of the bishops he waited for three years before he took summary measures against those who were still secretly or overtly hostile. When patience was seen to be unavailing he deposed Archbishop Stigand, no doubt at the instigation of the Pope, but in his place he set, not a Norman, who would have alienated the people, but a wise Italian, under whose counsels the Norman king and the English people were drawn together almost as closely as the king and people had been before the Normans came. Two effects resulted directly from this. The Conquest of England coincides in point of time with the great period of the Hildebrandine ideas; the reign of Gregory VII. and of the Popes appointed by his influence, in which a new interpretation was put on the relations of Church and State, and a jealous equilibrium established or attempted, the result of which in France and Germany seemed to be the tying of the State to the chariot-wheels of the Church. Of such a consummation there was in England no chance under William and Lanfranc, but nevertheless the coincidence in time was not without its consequences. England and her Church were drawn into the vortex of the Church politics of Europe, and the relations between Church and State in England were re-modelled upon the new type. The courts of the bishops for the trial of clerks were separated from the courts of the sheriffs; the election of prelates was arranged by a sort of compromise between royal power and canonical form; the bishops became barons and held their lands, or a portion of them, by the new baronial tenure; and their councils were marked off by a much broader line than they had been from the councils of the Witan, or the courts of the king. Then, too, a new concordat was arranged to regulate the exercise of the papal power, for which, before the Conquest, the English had had a respectful but very distant regard. The king insisted that when there were rival popes he should be the judge to determine which should be accepted in England; no suit or appeal should be carried to Rome without his leave; none of his servants should be excommunicated against his sovereign will; no legate should land without his permission; no ecclesiastical legislation should be enforced without his approval.

The
Norman
Bishops.

Within these limits the bishops had a great deal of new power; and, as they succeeded in a great measure to the implicit faith and obedience which the nation had given to their own English bishops, they were able to exert a very strong influence towards keeping the nation together. They were kept by the king upon his side, as opposed to the barons, and securing them he secured the nation. This is clear even in the history of Anselm, who, although opposed to and persecuted by the king, never forgot his duty to the people so far as to take part with the barons against him. Besides the bishops, however, there was in the monasteries a great reserve fund of national feeling; and, up to the reign of Henry II., what little we can trace of English feeling is to be traced in the writings of the monks; they kept alive an English sentiment as distinct from the new national idea that was to blend English and Norman, the king and the bishops more distinctly representing the latter.

In Stephen’s
reign.

Secular
school.

These things being so, we are able to understand what it was that gave the prelates the great moral weight they possessed in Stephen’s reign, and to perceive how vast was the importance of maintaining the alliance between them and the crown. We learn too how the many streams of influence which they guided reacted upon the clerical body itself, and produced several distinct schools or classes of ecclesiastical character. In the first place, the kings had taken prelates to be their ministers, and had promoted their ministers to be prelates. Bishop Roger of Salisbury was not only a powerful ecclesiastic but the royal justiciar, the head of all the courts and the treasurer of all the money of the king. Under him was a set of clerks who would set the fashion for one school of the clergy, secular in mind and aim and manners; often married men, so far as their right to marry can be accounted valid, canons of cathedrals where they provided for their children and made estates for themselves; worthy men most of them, the predecessors of the clerical magistrates of this day, far greater in quarter sessions and county meetings than in convocation or missionary work. That was one very strong school—a school that required tender handling both politically and ecclesiastically, and in the view of which we can understand how important it was for Bishop Roger to secure the consent of the Pope and the archbishops to his holding secular office. For it is said that, worldly man as he was, he refused, as a matter of conscience as well as policy, to act as the king’s minister, without the distinct approval of the saintly Anselm and his successors, the archbishops as well as the popes.

Ecclesiastical
school.

A second class was composed of the ecclesiastical politicians, men, that is, who were before all things Churchmen, of whom Henry of Winchester is one of the best specimens. These did not like the first, sink the clergyman in the statesman or the magistrate, and accept preferment as the mere reward of political service; they were not the Sadducees but the Pharisees of the time; they would not marry, nor sell livings, nor act against the Pope; whatever secular power they could get they would use for the benefit of the Church. To say this is not to condemn them; they saw in the service of the Church the clearest and readiest way of serving both God and man. These men were in tone and morals a higher set of men than the first. They were in close alliance with the see of Rome; they knew far more than the others about the state of Christendom generally; they were scholars, the founders of universities, the protectors of culture; they prevented the Church from becoming thoroughly secular; and, if there was a higher type, it was a type also much more liable to be assumed by counterfeits. It is a great mistake to undervalue this school. It would seem probable that both Archbishop Theobald as well as his rival, Henry of Winchester, should be referred to it; it was the party of the Legate, the party that tried to introduce the Civil law as a subject of study at Oxford; that went abroad to attend councils, that bearded royal tyranny in Church and State.

The Spiritual
school.