Chapter IV · (continued 3)

This business over, Anselm had now a few weeks, but a few weeks only, to give to his immediate pastoral work. Even those weeks were disturbed by a dispute with one of his suffragans. Dispute with the Bishop of London. The point at issue was the right of the Archbishop to consecrate churches and do other episcopal acts in such of his manors as were locally in other dioceses. This right was denied by Bishop Maurice of London, who sent two of his canons to forbid the Archbishop to consecrate the newly built church of Harrow.[1216] The matter was settled by an appeal to one who knew the ancient laws of England better than either Maurice or Anselm. Judgement of Wulfstan. Wulfstan of Worcester, now “one and alone of the ancient fathers of the English,” wrote back his judgement in favour of the Primate’s right.[1217] The question was thus 441 decided; Maurice did not dare to set up his judgement on such a matter against that of the venerable saint, the relic of a state of things which had passed away.[1218]

Those of the great men of England who had come to the Gemót at Gloucester from the more distant parts of the kingdom could hardly have reached their homes when they were again summoned to give the King the benefit of their counsels. William Rufus was so strong upon his throne that in his days assemblies were sure to be frequent. He was moreover planning a campaign beyond the sea, so that it was very doubtful whether he would be able this year to wear his crown in England at the usual times of Easter and Pentecost. Assembly at Hastings. February 2, 1094. The Easter Gemót was therefore in some sort forestalled. As the starting-point for his second invasion of Normandy the King had chosen the spot which had been his father’s head-quarters in the great invasion of England. At Pevensey he had once beaten back the invasion of his Norman brother; at Hastings he now gathered the force which was for the second time to avenge that wrong. The 442 chief men of England were again brought together. We may perhaps see in this assembly a case of the military Gemót. Anselm and several other bishops were there; but it is said that their presence was required to give their blessing to the King and his army before they crossed the sea.[1219] The fleet delayed by the wind. But that final blessing could not be given till many weeks after the army or assembly first came together. When the younger William sought to invade Normandy, he was kept lingering at Hastings, as the elder William had been kept lingering at Saint Valery when he sought to invade England. For six weeks the north wind refused to blow. While thus kept back from warfare, the King seems to have amused himself with ecclesiastical business and ecclesiastical ceremonies, and he further brought on himself the sharpest of ecclesiastical rebukes.[1220]

But one of the ceremonies which filled up the time of enforced leisure must have been something more than a matter of amusement to William the Red. Whatever traces of good feeling lingered in his heart gathered round the memory of his parents. And he was now called on to join in a rite which was the crowning homage to his father’s name, the most speaking memorial of his father’s victory and his father’s bounty. Again was a William encamped at Hastings called on to make his way to the hill of Senlac. But this time he could make his way thither in peaceful guise. The 443 The Abbey of Battle. place was no longer a wilderness or a camp, no longer the hill of the hoar apple-tree, no longer bristling with the thickset lines of battle, no longer heaped with the corpses of the conquerors and the conquered. The height which had once been fenced in by the palisade of the English host was now fenced in by the precinct wall of a vast monastery; its buildings, overhanging the hill side, covered the spot where Gyrth had fallen by the hand of William;[1221] its church, fresh from the hands of the craftsman, covered the ground which had beheld the last act of the day of slaughter; its high altar, blazing doubtless with all the skill of Otto and Theodoric,[1222] marked the spot where Harold, struck by the bolt from heaven, had fallen between the Dragon and the Standard. Completion of the building. After so many years had passed since the Conqueror had bidden that the memorial of the Conquest should rise on that spot and on no other, the minster of Saint Martin of the Place of Battle stood ready for consecration. Moved by the prayer of Abbot Gausbert, prompted too by his own reverence for the memory and the bidding of his father, William the younger bade that his father’s church should at once be hallowed in his own presence.[1223] Consecration of the church. February 11, 1094. On a Saturday then in the month of February, in the twenty-eighth year since the awful Saturday of Saint Calixtus, the two who were so unequally yoked together to draw the plough of the Church of England made their way to the place of Battle. A crowd of nobles and commons came together to the sight; and with them, besides the Primate, were seven 444 Bishops present; Ralph of Coutances. bishops of three different provinces. There was Ralph of Chichester, bishop of the diocese, whose jurisdiction within the favoured abbey was so zealously denied by every monk of Battle.[1224] There were Walkelin of Winchester, Osmund of Salisbury, John of Bath, and Gundulf of Rochester. There was the Primate’s great northern enemy, William of Durham. And there too was a suffragan of Rouen, the immediate successor of one of the fierce prelates who had blessed the Conqueror’s host on the morning of the great battle.[1225] Death of Geoffrey Bishop of Coutances. February 3, 1093. Geoffrey of Mowbray, Bishop and once Earl, had died a year before, and the episcopal chair of Coutances was now filled by his successor Ralph.[1226] How, it may be asked, came a Norman bishop in the court, almost in the army, of a king who was about to invade Normandy? The answer is easy. The Côtentin was now again in the hands of Henry,[1227] and the presence of its bishop at the court of William was a sign of the good understanding which now reigned between the two younger sons of the Conqueror. William and Anselm at Battle. But on such a day as this all interest gathers round the two main figures in the assembly, the two of highest rank in their several orders. William the Red, strange assistant in any religious rite, seems less out of place than usual as assistant in the rite which was to dedicate the work of his father. And if prayers and offerings were to go up on that spot for those who had fallen there on the defeated as well as on the victorious side, there was no mouth in which we should more gladly put them than in the mouth of him who was the chief celebrant on that day. Anselm, standing at the head of his foreign suffragans—​English 445 Wulfstan stood not by him—​before the altar of Saint Martin of the Place of Battle, seemed like a representative of universal Christendom, of universal peace and love. The holy man from Aosta sang his mass in honour of the holy man of Tours. And he sang it on the spot where Harold of England had stood by his standard in the morning, where William of Normandy had held the feast of victory in the evening, the morning and evening of the most memorable day in the history of our island since England became one kingdom.

The King at Hastings. From the hill of Battle William went back to the hill of Hastings, now crowned by the castle into which the hasty fortress of his father had grown.[1228] William of Saint-Calais. Six years earlier the Bishop of Durham, charged with treason, had in answer, pleaded that he had kept Hastings and its castle in the King’s obedience.[1229] Notwithstanding that answer, he had been banished; he had been recalled, and he now stood, with all his former authority, chief counsellor of the King, chief enemy of the Archbishop. Consecration of Robert Bloet to Lincoln. February 12, 1094. On the morrow of the dedication of Saint Martin’s, William of Saint-Calais joined with Anselm in the long-delayed consecration of the elect of Lincoln. The rite was done in the church of Our Lady within the castle of Hastings, by the hands of the same prelates who had the day before dedicated the church of Battle. It was to the see of Lincoln, not to the see of Dorchester, that Robert Bloet was consecrated. Thomas of Bayeux was not there to repeat his protest. He would have been there in vain. The bishop-elect had, in the course of his chancellorship, got together the means of settling such questions. His bishopric, granted at the time of the King’s repentance, had cost him nothing. It was now a matter of regret with Rufus that it had 446 cost him nothing; Robert had therefore to pay all the more for the establishment of the rights of his see. Robert’s gift to the King. One who had the means of knowing says that he gave the King the great sum of five thousand pounds to decide the cause in favour of Lincoln.[1230] This was done, the York writer complains, without the consent of the Archbishop of York and without the knowledge of his chapter.[1231] The case must have been settled either at Gloucester or now at Hastings. It was most likely at Hastings, as we can hardly fancy Thomas keeping away from the great Christmas gathering. Our Canterbury guide tells us a not very intelligible story which may show us how the claim of Thomas was spoken of in the southern metropolis. The cause of York had found at least professing friends among the great men at Hastings, though it met with no favour from the King himself. Plot against Anselm. Not knowing perhaps with what weighty arguments the elect of Lincoln had proved his case, certain unnamed bishops and lords deemed that they would please the King by anything which could annoy or discredit Anselm. They therefore insidiously tried to persuade the Archbishop to consecrate Robert without his making due profession to the church of Canterbury.[1232] Anselm stood firm. The King, when he heard of the plot, took to his magnanimous vein. His personal quarrel with Anselm should 447 never lead him to do anything against the dignity of the Church of Canterbury his mother.[1233] The King and Flambard perhaps enjoyed the joke together. But Robert Bloet made the needful profession, and was consecrated as Bishop of Lincoln by Anselm and the assembled prelates. Compromise with York. The controversy with York was at last formally settled, by a compromise which was announced in a royal charter. By this the Archbishop of York accepted the patronage of the new abbey of Selby in his own diocese, and that of the church of Saint Oswald at Worcester—​the city and diocese so long connected with York—​in exchange for his claims over Lindesey.[1234] The isle and city of Lindum has ever since remained an undisputed member of the southern province.

Character of Robert Bloet. The new Bishop of Lincoln, the first prelate consecrated to that see, has left a doubtful character behind him. He held his bishopric for thirty years, living on far into the reign of Henry, and keeping the royal favour till just before his death. His offices. Chancellor under both Williams, he, as usual, resigned that post on his consecration; but under Henry he ruled with great power in the higher office of Justiciar.[1235] Bountiful in his gifts to his see and to his church, the number of whose prebends he doubled, splendid and liberal in his manner of life, bountiful to the poor, winning the hearts of all around him, not himself a scholar, but a promoter of scholars, skilful in worldly business of every kind, he does not show us the best, but neither does he show us the worst type of the prelates of his day. He was charged with looseness of life; but his chief accuser found it wise to strike out 448 the charge, and his son Simon, Dean of his own church, was born while he was Chancellor to the Conqueror, quite possibly in lawful wedlock. His death. 1123. His last days form a striking incident in the next reign; here he chiefly concerns us as being in some sort, however strangely, bracketted with Anselm, as the other bishop whom the Red King named during his short time of repentance.[1236] Local legends about him. Anyhow it was hard on him to tell in after days how his ghost hindered anybody from praying or giving alms near his tomb in the minster, and that only because he removed the monks of Stow to Eynsham, because he subjected his see to the gift of a precious mantle to the King, or because he agreed to the wise measure which lessened the extent of his vast diocese.

Return of Herbert of Thetford. Another bishop appeared at this gathering, whose coming was, for the time, less lucky for himself than that of Robert Bloet. Herbert of Thetford, struck with penitence for his simoniacal bargain, had, as it will be remembered, gone beyond sea on an errand which of all others was most offensive to the King. He had gone to receive again from the Pope—​doubtless from Urban—​the bishopric which he had already bought of the King.[1237] He is deprived by the King. For this offence William now took away his staff; that is, he deprived him of his bishopric. With whose advice or consent this was done, and what line Anselm took with regard to such a step, we are not told. At all events the King now deprived a bishop of his office on the ground of what he deemed to be treason done without the realm. This was the converse of the act by which, forty-two years before, the nation had deprived another bishop on the ground of what they deemed to be treason within the realm.[1238] William however did not set up any doubtful 449 Stigand of his own in the church of Thetford. About a year later Herbert was again in possession of his see.[1239] How he was restored to the King’s favour we are not told. He may have deemed it no sin to win it by means which he had learned to look upon as sin when applied to the obtaining of a spiritual office. Next year he removed the seat of the East-Anglian bishopric once more. Herfast had moved it from Elmham to Thetford. With the good will and help of Roger Bigod Herbert now translated it to its final seat at Norwich. He there began the foundation of that vast church and monastery, the creation of which caused his name to be ever since held in at least local honour.

Meanwhile the north wind still refused to blow, and the King with his prelates, lords, and courtiers, still tarried at Hastings. Lent, 1094. Lent began before the fleet had a chance of sailing. The penitential season began with the usual ceremonies. The Archbishop said his mass and preached his sermon in the ears of the multitude who came together on the day of ashes, to receive, according to custom, the ashes of penitence from the hands of the Primate. Among them came the minions and young gallants of the court of Rufus, with their long combed and twined hair, their mincing gait, defying alike the commands of the Apostle and the dictates of common decency and manliness. Anselm rebukes the minions. The voice of Anselm rebuked them, as well he might, when the outward garb was but the sign of the deeper foulness within. Not a few were moved to repentance; they submitted to the 450 loss of their flowing locks, and put on again the form of men.[1240] Others were stubborn; they received neither ashes nor absolution. In this battle with a foolish custom which was in truth far more than a foolish custom, Anselm had not a few forerunners or followers. Saint Wulfstan, Gundulf, Serlo of Seez, all preached and acted vigorously against the long hair which was the symbol of the crying vice of the time.[1241] Anselm deemed that the evil called for something more than a single act of discipline. The man of God felt called on to strike at the root of the mischief; he was moved to make a warning appeal to the conscience, if any conscience was left, of the chief sinner of them all, and he made it, after his wont, at once gently and vigorously.

We may guess that the King had not been present at the ceremonies of Ash-Wednesday; had he been there, his presence would surely have been dwelled upon. It seems that Anselm, though openly out of the King’s favour, still visited him from time to time. Anselm’s interview with the King. One day therefore he went and sat down beside him, and spoke what was in his heart.[1242] The King was setting forth to conquer Normandy. His silence about the war. It is to be noticed that Anselm does not say a word as to the right or wrong of the war. Perhaps, after the challenge of Robert, the cause of Rufus may have seemed, even to him, to be technically just. Perhaps he knew that anything that could be 451 said on that subject would be fruitless. He may even have deemed, a view which had much to be said for it, that a conquest of Normandy by the Red King would be a good exchange for the rule of its present sovereign. And we must remember that wars of all kinds were in those days so constantly going on that they would seem like a necessary evil, a dark side of the economy of things, but one which could not be hindered. Even men like Anselm would come to look with less horror than one might expect on wars which were waged only by those whose whole business might seem to be warfare. Anyhow Anselm said nothing directly against the war, even though it was to be waged against the prince to whom he had lately owed allegiance and against the land which had been to him a second birth-place. He asks for help in his reforms. But he asked the King whether he had any right to look for success in that or any other enterprise, unless he did something to check the evils which had well nigh uprooted the religion of Christ in his realm. He called on William to give him the help of the royal authority in his own schemes of reform. The King asked what form his help was to take,[1243] and Anselm then put forth his views at length.

He asks leave to hold a synod. First and foremost, the King was to help in the work of reform by allowing Anselm to hold a synod of the realm. It will be remembered that, by the laws of the Conqueror, no synod could be held without the King’s licence, and the acts of the synod were of no force without the King’s confirmation.[1244] But under the Conqueror Lanfranc had, on the conditions thus laid down, held his synods without hindrance. That is to say, the elder William, in all causes and over all persons 452 within his dominions supreme, used that supremacy as the chief ruler of the Church from within, while the younger William turned that same supremacy into a weapon wherewith to assault the Church as an enemy from without. It is plain from the earnestness of Anselm one way—​one might almost say, from the earnestness of Rufus the other way—​that the synod was a real instrument for the reformation of manners. Advantages of the synod. It is plain that the assembled bishops, when they came together in a body, could do more both for ecclesiastical discipline and for moral improvement than they could do, each one in his own diocese. One cause may have been that, in a synod, the assembled prelates might seem to be really speaking as fathers in God, while the exercise of their local jurisdiction was too much mixed up with the petty and not always creditable details of their courts, with those tricks and extortions of archdeacons and other officials of which we have often heard. Anyhow, as the Roman Senate had good enough left in it to call forth the hatred of Nero, so an ecclesiastical synod had good enough left in it to call forth the hatred of William Rufus. No synod held under Rufus. Not one synod had he allowed to be held during the whole time of his reign, now in its seventh year.[1245] Anselm earnestly prayed to be allowed to hold one for the restoration of discipline and the reformation of manners. The King answered; “I will see to this matter when I think good; I will act, not after your pleasure but after my own. And, pray,” added he mockingly, “when you have got your synod, what will you talk about in it?” Anselm’s appeal against the fashionable vices. The man of God did not shrink from going straight to the crying evil of the time. What weighed most on Anselm’s mind 453 was not any mere breach of ecclesiastical rule—​such breaches he had to speak of, but he would not speak of them first;[1246] the burthen on his soul was the hideous moral corruption, a new thing on English ground, which had become rife throughout the land. Unless King and Primate, each in his own sphere, each with his own weapons, worked together to root out this plague, the kingdom of England might share the fate of the cities which it had come to resemble. A strict law was needed, the very hearing of which would make the guilty tremble.[1247] The words of Anselm were general; there was no personal charge against William; the Archbishop simply appealed to him as King to stop the sins of others. But all this makes us feel more strongly the wonderful character of such a scene, where two such men could be sitting side by side and exchanging their thoughts freely. But the heart of Rufus was hardened; he answered only by a sneer. “And what may come of this matter for you?” “For me nothing,” said Anselm; “for you and for God I hope much.”[1248]

454 There is so much of simple moral grandeur in this appeal of the righteous man against moral evil that we might almost have wished that Anselm’s discourse had ended at this point, and that he had not gone on to speak of matters which to us seem to have less of a moral and more of a technical nature. Ecclesiastical grievances. Yet Anselm would doubtless have thought himself faithless to his duty, if he had left the King’s presence without making a special appeal about the special grievances of ecclesiastical bodies. Moreover the wrongs of the bishoprics and abbeys were distinctly moral wrongs; the King’s doings involved breach of law, breach of trust; they were grievances on which the head of the ecclesiastical order was, as such, specially bound to enlarge. Wrongs of the church tenants. But they were also grievances which did not touch the ecclesiastical order only; the wrongs done to the tenants of the vacant churches are constantly dwelled on as one of the worst features of the system brought in by Rufus and Flambard. Anselm therefore deemed it his duty, before he parted from the King, to say a word on this matter also, a matter in which there could be no doubt that the King himself was the chief sinner. No bishopric was now vacant; but several abbeys, Saint Alban’s among them, were in the hands of Flambard. He prays the King to fill the vacant abbeys. Such a state of things called for his own care as Primate; he appealed to William to give him his help as King. In the monasteries which were left without rulers discipline became lax; the monks fell into evil courses; they died without confession. He prayed the King to allow the appointment of abbots to the vacant churches, lest he should draw on himself the judgement which must follow on the evils to which their vacancies gave cause.[1249] The King seems to have been less able to endure this rebuke 455 than the other. The disorders of his courtiers and of his own private life he could not defend on any showing; but the demand that the abbeys should be filled touched what he looked on as one of his royal rights. Rufus burst forth in wrath. “Are not the abbeys mine? The abbeys in what sense the King’s. Tush, you do as you choose with your manors; shall not I do as I choose with my abbeys?”[1250] The answer of Anselm drew a distinction which was a very practical one in those days, and which affects our legal language still. To this day the King, the Bishop, the Chapter, all speak of any episcopal see as “our cathedral church,” and all speak, from their several points of view, with equal truth. Such a church is the king’s church by virtue of the fundatorial rights which he claims, in some cases by real historic succession, in all cases by a legal theory. By virtue of those fundatorial rights, he claims to be informed of every vacancy, and to give his consent to a new election. In this sense Anselm did not deny that the abbeys were the King’s abbeys; he did deny that they were the King’s in the further sense in which Rufus claimed them. “The abbeys are yours,” he said, “to defend and guard as an advocate; they are not yours to spoil and lay waste. They are God’s; they are given that his servants may live of them, not that you may make campaigns and battles at their cost.[1251] You have manors and revenues of many kinds, out of which you may carry on all that belongs to you. Leave, may it please you, the churches to have their own.” Hostile answer of Rufus. “Truly,” says the King, “you know that what you say is most unpleasing to me. Your predecessor would never have dared to speak so to my father. I will do nothing on your account.” When 456 Anselm then saw that he was casting his words to the winds,[1252] he rose and went his way.

Lanfranc and Anselm. It may be that William Rufus spoke truly, and that Lanfranc would not, in any case, have dared to speak to the Conqueror as Anselm dared to speak to him. Lanfranc, with much that was great and good in him, was not a prophet of righteousness like Anselm. But it is far more certain that Lanfranc was never put to the test. The Conqueror never gave him any need to speak to him as Anselm had now need to speak to his son. What we blame in William the Great, what men like Wimund of Saint Leutfred dared to blame in him, Lanfranc could not blame. The position of Lanfranc in England involved the position of William. And, once granting that position, there was comparatively little to blame in the elder William. The beheading of Waltheof, the making of the New Forest, stand almost alone; and the beheading of Waltheof was at least no private murder; it was the judgement of what was in form a competent court. The harshness and greediness with which the Conqueror is justly charged was, after all, a small matter compared with the utter unlaw of his son’s reign. No need to rebuke the Conqueror on these points. And on the two subjects of Anselm’s present discourse, the elder William needed no rebuke at any time. His private life was at all times absolutely blameless, and, neither as Duke nor as King, did he ever turn his ecclesiastical supremacy into a source of gain. On both those points Lanfranc had as good a right to speak as Anselm; but on those points he was never called on to speak to his own master. Whether, in Anselm’s place, he would Estimate of Anselm’s conduct. have dared to speak as Anselm did, we cannot tell. But surely the holy boldness of Anselm cannot be looked on as in any way blameworthy, as either insolent or untimed. To him at least the time doubtless seemed most fitting. 457 He called on the King, before he exposed himself to the dangers of a campaign beyond the sea, to do something to win God’s favour by correcting the two grossest of the evils which were rife in his kingdom. The Assembly was clearly not dissolved when Anselm spoke; William could at once have filled the abbeys, he could at once have put forth a law against the other class of offenders, in the most regular form, by the advice of his Wise Men. Anselm might even have held his synod while the wind was waiting. The synod in Lanfranc’s day followed on the Gemót, and it took up only three days.[1253] Most of the bishops were present at Hastings; those who were absent had doubtless been summoned and, by the rule of the Great Charter and of common sense, they would be bound by the acts of those who obeyed the summons.The Archbishop’s claim to the regency. Moreover, according to the precedents of the late reign, Anselm would be the sole or chief representative of the King during his absence. He might fairly ask to be clothed with every power, temporal and spiritual, which was needed for the fit discharge of kingly as well as pastoral duties.

Anselm attempts to recover the King’s favour. Anselm was deeply grieved at the ill success of his personal appeal to the King. He was now wholly out of the King’s favour, and he felt that, without some measure of support from the King, he could not carry out the reforms, ecclesiastical and moral, for which he longed.[1254] He was ready to do anything that could be done with a good conscience in order to win back the King’s good will. He sent the bishops to William, to crave that he might, of the King’s free grace, be again admitted to his friendship. If the King would not grant him his favour, let him at least say why he would not grant it; if Anselm had wronged him in any way, he was 458 ready to make the wrong good.[1255] The bishops laid the prayer of their metropolitan before the King. The answer was characteristic. “I have no fault to find with the Archbishop; yet I will not grant him my favour, because I hear no reason given why I should.”[1256] What those words meant in the mouth of Rufus the bishops knew very well. Advice of the bishops to give more money. They went back to tell the Primate that the mystery was clear.[1257] The King’s favour was to be won only by money, and by money in no small store. Their counsel was that Anselm should at once give the King the five hundred pounds which he had before offered, and that he should promise him another gift of the same amount as soon as he could get it out of his men.[1258] On those terms they fully believed that the King would grant him his peace and friendship. They saw no other way for him; they were in the same strait themselves, and knew no other way out of it.[1259]

In the counsel thus given to Anselm by his suffragans we hear the words, not of utterly worldly and unscrupulous men, but of the ordinary prelates of the time, good men, many of them, in all that concerned their own personal lives and the ordinary administration of their churches, but not men disposed to risk or dare much, men disposed to go on as they best might in very bad times, without doing anything which might make things still worse. Anselm’s grounds for refusing. In the eyes of Anselm, on the other hand, things hardly could be made worse; if they could, it would be by consenting to them. By an unflinching 459 assertion of principle things might be made better; in the worst case the assertor of principle would have delivered his own soul. In Anselm’s eyes the course which his suffragans suggested was sinful on every ground; moreover—​an argument which some of them might better understand—​it was utterly inexpedient. He refused to make his way out of his difficulties by the path which they proposed. The King allowed that he had no ground of complaint; he was simply angry because he could not get five hundred pounds out of him as the price of his favour. If now, while his appointment was still fresh, he should win the King’s favour at such a price, the King would get angry with him at any other time that might suit him, in order to have his wrath bought off in the same way. This last argument seems to show that Anselm was after all not so lacking in worldly wisdom as some have thought. He will not oppress his tenants. But his main argument was that he would not commit the crime of wringing any more money out of his tenants. They had been frightfully oppressed and robbed during the vacancy; he had not as yet been able to do anything to relieve them; he would not lay fresh burthens upon them; he would not flay alive those who were already stripped to their skins.[1260] Again, he would not deal with his lord the King as if his friendship was a thing to be bought and sold. He owed the King faith and honour, and it would be doing him dishonour to treat his favour like a horse or an ass to be paid for in vile money. He utterly refused to put such an insult upon his sovereign. His answer to the bishops. He told his suffragans that they should rather do their best to persuade the King to deal of his free grace as it was fit for him to deal with his archbishop and spiritual father. Then he, on his part, would strive to do all that 460 he could and might do for his service and pleasure. This ideal view of the relation of King and Primate was doubtless above the heads of John of Bath, of Robert of Lincoln, of Robert of Chester, and of William of Durham in his present mood. It was surely one of them, rather than Osmund or Robert of Hereford, who answered; “But at least you will not refuse him the five hundred pounds which you once offered.” Anselm answered that he could not give that either; when the King refused it, he had promised it to the poor, and the more part of it had been given to them already. The bishops went back to the King on their unpromising errand. The King more hostile than ever. William bade them tell the Archbishop that he hated him much yesterday, that he hated him much to-day, and that he would hate him more and more to-morrow and every other day. He would never hold Anselm for father or archbishop; he cursed and eschewed his blessings and prayers. Let him go where he would; he need not stay any longer there at Hastings, if it was to bless him on his setting sail that he was waiting.[1261]

Anselm leaves Hastings. The Red King had thus cast aside another offer of grace. Our guide tells us; “We departed from the court with speed, and left him to his will.” The pronoun is emphatic. From that time, if not from an earlier time, English Eadmer was the inseparable companion of Anselm. Anselm and Eadmer then turned away, at what exact date we are not told. But the north wind seems not to have blown till more than half the month of March had passed. Then at last King William of England set sail from Hastings for the conquest of Normandy. He went without Anselm’s blessing; yet some of the ceremonies which had been gone through during 461 his sojourn at Hastings must surely have dwelled in his mind. Fresh from the rite which in some sort marked the completion of his father’s work in England, the William crosses to Normandy. March 19, 1094.younger William set out so far to undo his father’s work as to bring Normandy into political subjection to England. At what Norman haven he landed we are not told; it was seemingly in some part of the lands of his earlier conquest, the lands on the right bank of the Seine. Before swords were drawn, an attempt was made to settle the dispute between the brothers.Vain attempts to settle the dispute. King and Duke met in person; what was their place of meeting we are not told; but no agreement could be come to.[1262] A second meeting took place, in which the guarantors of the former treaty were appealed to, much as Cnut had appealed to the witnesses of the treaty between him and Eadmund.[1263] Verdict of the guarantors against William. The guarantors, the twenty-four barons, twelve on each side, who had sworn to the treaty, agreed in a verdict which laid the whole blame upon the King. The words of our account—​it is the English Chronicler who speaks—​clearly imply that the guarantors on William’s side agreed in this verdict no less than those who swore on behalf of Robert.[1264] And he adds from himself that Rufus would neither allow that he was in fault nor abide by his former engagement.[1265] This meeting therefore was yet more 462 fruitless than the former; the brothers parted in greater anger than ever.[1266] The Duke went back to Rouen; the King again took up his head-quarters at Eu.[1267]

Again on Norman soil, William began to practise the arts which had stood him in such stead in his former enterprise on the duchy. He hired mercenaries; he gave or promised money or lands to such of the chief men of Normandy as were willing to forsake the allegiance of Robert; he quartered his knights both in the castles which he had hitherto held, and in those which he won to himself by these means.[1268] Some of these last were very far from Eu. Castles held by the King. It shows how successful were the arts of Rufus, how wide was the disaffection against Robert, when we find castles, far away from one another, far away from the seat of William’s power in eastern Normandy, but hemming in the lands in the Duke’s obedience on two dangerous frontiers, garrisoned by the King’s troops. We are reminded of the revival of Henry’s power in the Côtentin when we read La Houlme. that the castle of La Houlme, at the junction of the two rivers Douve and Merderet, lying south-east from Valognes and nearly east from Saint Saviour, was now held for William.[1269] Argentan. So was another stronghold in quite another quarter, not far from the Cenomannian border, the castle of Argentan on the upper course of the Orne, to the south of the great forest of Gouffers. Two 463 famous captains held these threatening posts. Argentan was commanded by Earl Roger’s son, Roger the Poitevin.[1270] La Houlme was held by William Peverel, the lord of Nottingham and the Peakland.[1271] Taking of Bures. But the first military exploit of the campaign was wrought in a land nearer to Eu. Bures—​whether still held or not by the faithful Helias we are not told—​was taken, and the garrison were made prisoners; some of them were kept in Normandy, others were sent by Rufus for better safe-keeping in his own kingdom.[1272]

Rufus thus pressed the war vigorously against his brother, with the full purpose of wholly depriving him of the duchy. Robert calls in King Philip. Robert, in his distress, again called on his over-lord, and this time with more effect than before.[1273] The French intervention was at least able to turn the balance for a while against Rufus. No object was more important for Robert than the recovery of the two strongholds which threatened him, one in the dangerous land on the upper Orne, the other in the no less dangerous Constantine peninsula. Siege of Argentan. A joint expedition of the new allies was agreed on, and King and Duke appeared side by side before Argentan. The castle stood on a height of no great elevation above the river, with the town, as usual, spreading down to its banks. The existing fragments show that the fortress and its precinct covered a vast space, but no architectural feature remains as a witness of the siege of Argentan by Philip 464 and Robert. The town contains several attractive buildings of later date, ecclesiastical, civil, and military. There are churches, town-walls with their towers, the later château within the fortress; but of the stronghold which Roger of Poitou had to guard against the powers of Rouen and Paris but little can be traced. There are some massive and irregular pieces of wall, and part of a polygonal donjon, the latter at least far later than Roger’s day. But of the size and strength of the castle there can be no doubt. It is therefore with some little wonder that we read that the besiegers found its capture so easy a matter as they did, especially when its defender was one of the house of Montgomery and Bellême. Surrender of Argentan. On the very first day of the siege the castle surrendered without bloodshed. Roger of Poitou, with seven hundred knights and as many esquires—​a name which we are now beginning to come across—​and his whole garrison were made prisoners and were kept in ward till they were ransomed.[1274] Here we see the hand of Philip; we see, as in some other cases which we have come across already, the beginning of one of the institutions of chivalry. Ransom of prisoners. We shall presently see the custom of the ransom become a marked feature of the wars between France and England—​so we shall soon find ourselves obliged to call them—​in the eleventh century no less than in the fourteenth. But the bulky King of the French was for the present contented with this one exploit and with so valuable a stock of captives. Philip went back into France, and left his Norman vassal to go on with the campaign alone.[1275] Robert now drew some spirit from 465 success. He marched westward, and attacked La Houlme. Robert takes La Houlme The castle surrendered; the lord of the Peak, with eight hundred men, became the prize of the Duke’s unusual display of vigour.[1276]

The war went on; each side burned the towns and took the men of the other side.[1277] But the tide had for the moment decidedly turned against the Red King. Difficulties of Rufus. The loss of Argentan and La Houlme, with their commanders and their large garrisons, was a serious military blow. The payment of their ransoms might be a still more serious financial blow. And the payment of a ransom, by which he only got back again what he had had before, would be less satisfactory to the mind of Rufus than the payment of bribes and wages by which he had a hope of gaining something fresh. The hoard at Winchester seems at last to have been running low; but when William Rufus was king and when he had Randolf Flambard to his minister, there could be no lack of ways and means to fill it again. Further taxation. Specially heavy were the gelds laid on England both in this year and in the following.[1278] And money was gained by one device which surely would have come into the head of no king and no minister save those by whom it actually was devised. A great levy was ordered; Levy of English soldiers. King William sent over his bidding that twenty thousand Englishmen should come over to help the King in Normandy.[1279] Englishmen had by this time got used to service 466 beyond sea. Nothing is said of any difficulty in getting this great force together. The troops were gathered at Hastings, ready to set sail. Each man had brought with him ten shillings, the contribution of his shire for his maintenance in the King’s service. For the men who answered to Rufus’ bidding were no mercenaries, not even housecarls; they were the fyrd of England, summoned, by a perhaps unjustifiable but not very wonderful stretch of authority, to serve their king beyond the sea. But, when they were ready to sail, Flambard takes away the soldiers’ money. Flambard came, and by the King’s orders took away each man’s money, and bade them all go home again.[1280] One would like to know something of the feelings of the men who were thus strangely cheated; we should surely have heard if there had been any open resistance. Anyhow, by this amazing trick, the Red King had exchanged the arms of twenty thousand Englishmen for a sum of ten thousand pounds of English money. After all, the money might be of greater use than the men in a war with Philip of Paris.

If William thus reckoned, he was not deceived. He was still at Eu. Philip was again in arms; his forces joined those of Robert; again King and Duke marched side by side, this time with the purpose of besieging the King of the English in his Norman stronghold. Rufus buys off Philip. The ten thousand pounds now served William’s turn quite as well as the twenty thousand men could have served it. The combined French and Norman host had reached 467 Longueville on the Scie, with streams and forests between them and Eu.[1281] Longueville was the last stage of their march. Thither Rufus sent those who knew how to bring his special arguments to bear on the mind of Philip. The King again went back to France, and the confederate army was broken up.[1282]

Contemporary notices of the campaign. There is something very singular in the way in which this second Norman war of William Rufus is dealt with by those who wrote at or near the time. Some make no mention of it at all; others speak of it only casually; our own Chronicler, who gives the fullest account of all, does not carry it on to any intelligible issue of success or of failure. In his pages, and in those of some others, the war drops out of notice, without coming to any real end of any kind.[1283] The monk of Saint Evroul, so lavish in local Norman details, seems to have had his head too full of the local strifes among the Norman nobles to tell us anything of a warfare which in our eyes comes so much nearer to the likeness of a national struggle. It must always be remembered that the local wars which tore every district of Normandy in pieces did not stop in the least because two hostile kings were encamped on Norman soil. Difference between England and Normandy. There cannot be a more speaking comment, at once on the difference between Robert and either of his brothers and on the essential difference 468 between the ordinary state of Normandy and of England. With us private war was never lawful; we needed not the preaching of the Truce of God.[1284] William the Great, when his authority was fully established, kept England in peace; and in his later years the peace of Normandy itself, as distinguished from the border lands, was broken only by the rebellion of his own son. So in England there still were rebellions alike against Rufus and against Henry; but, when the rebellion was crushed, the land was at rest. Private wars go on in Normandy. In Normandy, as soon as the hand of the great ruler was taken away, things fell back into the state in which they had been during his own minority. And they remained in that state till William the Red in his later years again established order in the duchy. One can well understand that the endless ups and downs in the local struggles which went on close to every man’s door really drew to themselves far more of men’s thoughts than the strife of King William, King Philip, and Duke Robert himself. The two kings were but two more disputants added to the crowd, and they were disputants who really did much less harm to the land in general than was done by its own native chiefs. It is not very wonderful then that we hear so little of this war from the Norman side. It is not wonderful that, on the English side, when stirring events began again before long to happen in England, the Norman war dropped out of sight. And presently events in the world’s history were to come which made even the warfare of England and France seem trifles amid the general stir of “the world’s debate.”

Relations of Rufus and Henry. For the last events of Rufus’ second Norman war we have to go wholly to our one witness in our own tongue. It is plain that the King, even after his gold 469 had turned Philip back, did not feel at all at ease in his Norman quarters. He seems to have distrusted two important personages at the other end of the duchy, his other brother and one of the mightiest of his own subjects. Henry, Ætheling and again Count, was safe in his castle of Domfront, among the people who had chosen him as their protector. At one period of this year, he is described as at war with both his brothers at once.[1285] We find him taking the part of the lord of Saint Cenery, Robert son of Geroy,[1286] against the common enemy, Robert of Bellême. Saint Cenery taken by Robert of Bellême. His help however did not hinder the cherished fortress from falling into the hands of the tyrant.[1287] We hear of him before the end of the war in a way which implies at least some suspicious feeling between himself and the King his brother. Henry and Hugh summoned to Eu. Besides Henry, Hugh of Chester—​rather Hugh of Avranches or Hugh of Saint-James—​was also in his own continental possessions. The King summoned both of them to come to him at Eu, and, as the state of the duchy did not allow them to come across Normandy by land, he sent ships to bring them.[1288] But Henry and Hugh, from whatever causes, 470 did not choose to meet the King face to face. They go to Southampton. October 31, 1094. They keep Christmas in London. Instead of sailing to Eu or its port, they made for Southampton, where they landed and seemingly stayed—​with what objects we are not told—​for some weeks.[1289] Thence they went to London, and kept Christmas there. King William was not this year wearing his crown either at Westminster or at Gloucester. But it is clear that the movements of his youngest brother had an effect upon his own. For the first three days of the holy twelve he stayed at Whitsand. The King comes to England. December 28, 1094. On the fourth day, the feast of the Innocents, the anniversary of the dedication of the West Minster, he crossed the sea and landed at Dover.[1290] Thence he seemingly came to London, where Henry was. Whatever quarrels or suspicions had sprung up between the King and the Ætheling were now made up. Henry was received into his brother’s fullest William and Henry reconciled. confidence. He stayed in England till Lent began, when he went to spend the penitential season in Normandy. But it was not to be an idle season; in the month between Epiphany and Lent, the Red King had made his preparations for a campaign in which Henry was to Henry goes to Normandy, c. Feb. 9, 1095. take his place. The Count of Coutances then went again beyond sea with great treasures to be used on the King’s behalf against his brother—​Earl Robert, as English lips called him. “And ofttimes upon the Earl he won, and to him mickle harm either on land and His warfare with Robert.on men did.”[1291] Here ends our story. We get no further 471 details till William became master of all Normandy by quite another process. General results of the campaign. But though we get no details of the war from Norman sources, we do get a general picture of its results. The no-rule of Robert is once more set before us in speaking words. The soft Duke, who feared his subjects more than they feared him, was benumbed with softness and idleness.[1292] He is contrasted with both his brothers. Progress of Henry. Henry held his stronghold at Domfront, together with a large but undefined part of the duchy, including without doubt the more part of his old peninsular county. Some places he had won by arms; others, like Domfront itself, had sought his rule of their own free will.[1293] Within these bounds he yielded to his brother the Duke just so much service as he thought good,[1294] which at this particular moment would be little indeed. And the other brother who wore the diadem of England held more than twenty castles on Norman ground. He, unlike Robert, was a ruler whom men feared; and his gifts, and the fear of him together, kept many of the great men of the land, not only in his allegiance, but in his zealous service.[1295] If Normandy was not conquered, it was at least effectually dismembered.

Norman supporters of William. The list of the Norman nobles who joined the King from beyond sea takes in most of the names with 472 which we are most at home. There is Ralph of Conches, Gerard of Gournay, Richard of Courcy. We hear now too of Philip of Braose, a name to become famous in more than one part of our island. And we find the names of men yet higher in power, and nearer to the ducal house. William of Eu. Stephen of Aumale. There is the first author of the late troubles, Count William of Eu, for the present still an adherent of Rufus, before long to be heard of in quite another character. With him stands Count Stephen of Aumale, also before long to play a part in our story wholly different from that which we find him playing now. Robert of Meulan. And it is needless to say that Count Robert of Meulan was the Red King’s servant in his Norman, as well as in his English character.[1296] Walter Giffard. Nor do we wonder to find in the same list—​for he was Earl of Buckingham as well as lord of Longueville—​the name of Walter Giffard, him who appeared as an aged man forty years before.[1297] He still lived, while, during this very year, more than one of the elder generation of the famous men of Normandy passed away. Death of Roger of Beaumont. 1094. The father of the Count of Meulan, the old Roger of Beaumont, renowned so many years before alike in arms and in council,[1298] died on the Norman soil which he had guarded so well, and which he seems never to have left. He had for some years left the world, to become a monk in the monastery of Preaux of his father’s rearing.[1299] His estates had passed to his son at Meulan, the mighty vassal of three lords. Henry Earl of Warwick. His younger son Henry had his lot cast in England, where, perhaps before this time, the Red King bestowed on him the earldom of Warwick. And, in the same year as the lord of Beaumont, died, far away in England, another Roger, 473 Death of Roger of Montgomery. 1094. like him a monk, but four days before a mighty earl, Roger of Montgomery, of Arundel, and of Shrewsbury, the youngest brother of the house beyond the Severn bridge of which he at least claimed to be the founder.[1300] His vast possessions were divided at his death. Robert of Bellême succeeds his father in Normandy, and Hugh in England. Robert of Bellême, already heir of his mother in the border-land, now became heir of his father in Normandy. The earldom of Shrewsbury and Roger’s other English estates passed to his second son Hugh, who bears the character of being the only one of the sons of Mabel who was mild and gentle[1301]—​mild and gentle, we must understand, to Normans, perhaps even to Englishmen, but certainly not to captive Britons. Of Hugh, as well as of Robert of Bellême and Roger of Poitou, as well as of Arnulf of Montgomery, a fourth son of the same fierce stock, we shall hear much as our tale goes on. Death of Hugh of Grantmesnil. In England too, perhaps within his sheriffdom of Leicester, died Hugh of Grantmesnil, of whom we have lately heard in the civil wars both of Normandy and of England, and whom his own shire and his neighbours of Northamptonshire had no reason to bless. His burial at Saint Evroul. His body, we need hardly say, found its way across the sea, to lie among his loyal bedesmen at Saint Evroul.[1302] These men all left the world in the year with which we are now dealing, Death of Walter Giffard. 1102. and left the hoary Earl of Buckingham to be for eight years longer the representative of an earlier day.[1303] The hands which eight and twenty years before had been too feeble to bear the banner of the Apostle[1304] were still, it would seem, ready to do whatever was still found for them to do in the service of the Red King. But the warfare of the King and his 474 partisans is set down simply as one among the many ways in which Normandy was torn in pieces by her own children.[1305] Eadmer’s judgement of the campaign. An English writer meanwhile, on whose main subject the Norman campaigns of Rufus had but a very indirect bearing, speaks casually of this expedition as an undertaking on which a vast deal of money was spent, but by which very little was gained.[1306]

It is indeed to be borne in mind, as supplying at least a partial explanation of the way in which the second Norman expedition comes to an end without any end, that things in England were, just as they had been three years and a half before, in a state which urgently called for the presence of the King within his kingdom. Wretchedness of England. We know not whether it at all moved him that the heavy taxation which had been laid on his kingdom for the cost of his warfare had brought the land to the lowest pitch of wretchedness. Men, we are told, had ceased to till the ground; hunger followed; there were hardly left any who could tend the dying or bury the dead.[1307] These things might not have greatly stirred the heart of the Red King; but he may, like other tyrants, have felt that there was a bound beyond which oppression could not be safely carried. Causes for the King’s return. And there were political and military reasons which called him back. He could not afford to jeopard his undisputed possession of England for the sake of a few more castles in Normandy. He 475 could hardly afford to jeopard for their sake the imperial supremacy of his crown over the whole isle of Britain, a supremacy which he was at that moment specially called on to assert. The year of the second Norman campaign was a year of special importance in the history both of Scotland and of Wales. Affairs of Scotland While the Red King was warring and bribing in Normandy, Scotland had, as in the days of Siward, received a king from England, and, what had not happened in the days of Siward, her people had slain the foreign nominee, and had again chosen a king of their own. The first reign of Donald, the momentary reign of Duncan, the beginning of the second reign of Donald, all of them events which were not mere changes of sovereign, but real revolutions in the state of the nation, had happened between the death of Malcolm and the return of William from Normandy thirteen months later. and Wales. Wales too had risen in a movement which had more than was usual of the character of real national insurrection, and the movement had called for all the energies of the new Earl of Shrewsbury and of the King himself on his return. Plots at home. And a plot yet nearer home, a plot to deprive the King of his crown and life, a plot devised by men who had been just now the foremost in supporting his cause, broke out soon after his return. It broke out so soon after it that one is tempted to think that it was already hatching, and that it was one of the causes which brought him back. The seeming break-down of the Red King’s second Norman campaign thus becomes more intelligible than some of the other cases where he began an undertaking and failed to finish it. William had plenty to do in Britain, both in camp and in council. As soon as he was assured of the adhesion of his brother Henry, he could afford, indeed he was driven, to leave him to do the work which had to be done in Normandy.

476 § 4. The Council of Rockingham. December, 1094–March, 1095.

Notices of the year 1095. The year to which the last Christmas feast introduces us brings strongly home to us the singular way in which our general chroniclers follow one line of events, while the special biographer of the Archbishop follows another. There is no contradiction; but the gaps which have to be filled up in each narrative are remarkable. It is not perhaps wonderful that the biographer of Anselm should, even in a work which bears a general title, pass by events which in no way affected the history of Anselm. It is more remarkable that one of the most striking scenes in Anselm’s history should not have been thought worthy of notice by the more general annalists of our land. But so it is. Councils of the year. The year 1095 is a year of very stirring events, and it is preeminently a year of councils. But, with a single exception, our two authorities do not record the same events and the same councils. Both tell us of the pallium being brought to Anselm; but, while one tells us nothing of the most striking of the assemblies in which Anselm bore a part, the other tells us nothing of the conspiracy, the revolt, the war, which specially mark this year in the general story of England.

Alleged Welsh campaign. January 9, 1095? If our story is rightly told, the Christmas meeting of William and Henry, followed before long by a Norman campaign on the part of Henry, was followed yet more immediately by a Welsh campaign on the part of William. The King took the affairs of his own island into his own hands, and, for the present, he left those of the mainland to the Count of Coutances. A winter campaign in Wales does not sound very promising, and we are not surprised to hear that it did not add much to the 477 glory of the Red King’s arms.[1308] At all events it must have been short, for, in the course of January and February we find him at points at a considerable distance from the Welsh border. Movements of William. January-February, 1095. In January he was at Cricklade in Wiltshire; in February he was at Gillingham in Dorset, near to Ælfred’s monastery of Shaftesbury, and itself the scene of the election of the Confessor.[1309] In both cases we hear of the King’s movements through incidental notices in our ecclesiastical story. The second is part of the story of Anselm; the first does not concern Anselm himself; it forms part of the tale of the holiest of his suffragans.

Death of Wulfstan. In this month of January the soul of the last surviving English bishop, the sainted Wulfstan of Worcester, passed away. In the eyes of one annalist his death was the great event of the year, and was announced by signs and wonders in the heavens. “There was a stir among 478 the stars, and Wulfstan Bishop of Worcester died!”[1310] Sickness of Wulfstan. The health of the good old man had been for some time ailing; we have seen that he had latterly been unable to show himself in assemblies and ceremonies. At the Easter, 1094. Easter of the year before his death, while the King was in Normandy, he told his steward that on the day of the feast he meant to dine in state with “good men.” He dines with “good men.” The steward, mistaking the meaning of a phrase which is ambiguous in several languages and which was specially so in the English of his day,[1311] got together many of the rich men of the neighbourhood—​we are not told whether the Sheriff Urse was among them. The day came; the Bishop entered the hall with a large company of the poor, and ordered seats to be set for them among the other guests. The steward was displeased;[1312] but Wulfstan explained that those whom he brought with him were the men who had the true riches; he had rather sit down with such a company than sit down, as he had often done, with the King of the English.[1313] For Rufus, we are told, always received 479 Wulfstan with honour; General respect for Wulfstan. we may doubt whether either knew enough of the other’s language for rebukes to be met by repartees. The great men of the realm did the like. Foreign princes, prelates, and potentates honoured him with gifts and asked for his prayers.[1314] His correspondence. Among his correspondents were the Pope—​doubtless Urban—​Malcolm and Margaret of Scotland, and the kings of Ireland. His increased sickness. Whitsuntide, 1094.To this list are added the Archbishop of Bari and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, which last name suggests correspondence on the common needs of Christendom. At Pentecost Wulfstan was very sick; he sent for his special friend Bishop Robert of Hereford, him whose skill had foretold that Remigius would never dedicate his minster.[1315] Wulfstan and Robert of Hereford. Robert came; the humble Wulfstan made his confession and submitted to the discipline.[1316] But he lived on during the rest of that year. Shortly after the beginning of the new year, he had another visit from Bishop Robert and two abbots of his diocese, Serlo of Gloucester and Gerald, abbot of the still unfinished house which Robert Fitz-hamon was raising at Tewkesbury.[1317] Wulfstan again confessed; he foretold his own 480 death; he comforted his friends; he gave himself to religious exercises, causing his seat in his chamber to be so placed that he could see the altar in his chapel.[1318] Death of Wulfstan. January 18, 1095. His appearance to Bishop Robert. At last, not many days after Robert’s visit, the one remaining bishop of the old stock passed away from his church and from the world. Men believed that he appeared in transitu to his friend Bishop Robert, who, as one who reconciled his episcopal virtues with skill in the affairs of the world, was now with the King at Cricklade.[1319] The vision bade Robert come to his friend’s burial; he came, and the ceremony took place four days after Wulfstan’s death, among a mighty gathering of those who had honoured His burial. Jan. 22.him in life. A generation later it was made a subject of complaint, a subject of rebuke to an age which, we are told, was loath to believe in signs and wonders, that so holy a man was not formally enrolled on the list of saints.[1320] Aftertimes made up for this neglect. Wulfstan 481 became the chief object of local devotion, and no small object of devotion throughout the land. The saint whom Rufus had honoured in life became after death the special object of the devotion of King John, who hoped to be safer in the next world if his body lay in Wulfstan’s church under the shadow of Wulfstan’s shrine.

Another link with the past was thus snapped, and, what the King at least thought more of, another bishopric passed into the hands of Flambard. About a month after the shade of Wulfstan had appeared to Bishop Robert in the King’s court at Cricklade, the living Anselm showed himself to the King in person in his court at Gillingham.[1321] Notwithstanding the hatred which William had expressed towards him at Hastings, the Archbishop had reasons which urged him to seek another interview. Anselm and Urban. The errand on which he came was one at which he had hinted before he had been invested with the archbishopric. He had then fairly warned the King that, if he became archbishop, he must acknowledge Urban as Pope.[1322] He had as yet done nothing towards acknowledging him; he had taken no step which involved the acknowledgement of Urban or of any other pope. With Anselm moral questions came first. The points on which he had first striven to awaken the conscience of the King had been the moral corruption of his court and kingdom, and the synod 482 which, in Anselm’s eyes at least, was the best means for its reformation. But William had so utterly refused his consent to the holding of a synod, he had so utterly refused to give Anselm any help in his schemes of moral reform, that Anselm perhaps thought it useless to press those subjects again upon him. The point which he still thought it his duty to press was one which to us seems of infinitely less importance than either, but with regard to which we must look at matters with the eyes of Anselm’s day and not with the eyes of our own. Anselm was full archbishop in all points spiritual and temporal, as far as the spiritual and temporal powers of England could make him so. Need of the pallium. But he still lacked one badge of metropolitan authority, without which his position would certainly be deemed imperfect anywhere out of England. He had not received the archiepiscopal pallium from Rome. He naturally wished for this final stage of his promotion, this sign of recognition, as he would deem it, on the part of the Universal Church and her chief pastor. Elder usage as to the pallium. Now this supposed need of the pallium was not, like some of the claims of the Roman see, anything new. English archbishops had gone to receive the pallium at Rome, or they had had the pallium sent to them from Rome, in the days of the elder William, in the days of Eadward, in the days of kings long before then.[1323] Lanfranc had gone to Rome for his pallium with the full good will of the Conqueror,[1324] and one of the chief ecclesiastical difficulties of the time immediately before the Conqueror’s coming was the belief that Stigand had received his pallium in an irregular way.[1325] The amount of dependence on the Roman see which was implied in the receipt of this badge of honour may perhaps be questioned. It would be differently understood at Rome and at Canterbury.483 It would be differently understood at Canterbury, according to the temper of different archbishops, or according to their English or foreign birth. The pallium not needful for the validity of archiepiscopal acts. But it is at least plain that the possession of the pallium was not at this time looked on as at all needful for the validity of any archiepiscopal act. Anselm, as yet unclothed with it, had consecrated a bishop and had proposed to hold a synod. Still for the new archbishop to go to Rome to receive that badge of his office which was still lacking was a simple matter of course. Doubtless the journey needed the formal leave of the king; but no king but William Rufus would have thought of refusing his leave for the purpose. William had indeed not acknowledged Urban; but Anselm had warned William that, if he became archbishop, he must continue to acknowledge Urban, and William had allowed him to become archbishop on those terms. The earlier conduct of William in such matters could not have led Anselm to think that he attached much real importance to the matter. William of Saint-Calais had put forth the loftiest views of papal authority in the hearing of William and Lanfranc, and they had been objected to on quite other grounds. King and Primate had rightly objected when the Bishop of Durham appealed from the King and his Witan to the Pope of Rome; they had not quarrelled with the Bishop of Durham simply because he had implied that there was a Pope of Rome. Character of William’s refusal. The refusal to allow Anselm to go for the pallium could have come only from a king who was determined to raise every point which could annoy the archbishop, above all to raise every point which could by any chance drive him to a resignation of the archbishopric. Or better still than all in the Red King’s eyes would it be to find some point which could anyhow lead to Anselm’s being deprived of the archbishopric. If such an end could be gained, it would 484 matter not by what power or by what process it was done; it would matter not if it involved the forsaking on William’s own part of every position which he had taken up.

Anselm asks leave to go to Urban for the pallium. William will acknowledge no pope. Anselm then came to Gillingham, and asked the King’s leave to go to the Pope to ask for his pallium. William at once asked to which Pope he meant to go.[1326] Anselm of course answered, To Urban. The King said that he had not yet acknowledged Urban as Pope, that it was neither his custom nor that of his father to allow any one in his kingdom so much as to call any one Pope without his leave. So precious was this right to him that to seek to take it from him was the same thing as to seek to take away his crown.[1327] Anselm’s argument. Anselm then set forth the case of the two contending Popes, and his own personal case in the matter. He reminded the King of what he had told him at Rochester before he took the archbishopric, that, as Abbot of Bec, he had acknowledged Urban, and that he could not withdraw from the obedience which he had pledged to him. William’s answer. The King, in great wrath, said that Anselm could not at once keep his faith towards himself and the obedience which without his leave he had promised to Urban.[1328] Position of Anselm towards Urban. Now, when Anselm pledged his obedience to Urban, he was not an English subject, and he needed no leave from the King of England for anything. He acknowledged Urban, as all the rest of Normandy acknowledged him. The obedience which he had thus pledged Anselm looked on as still personally binding on him, though his temporal 485 allegiance was transferred to a kingdom where Urban was not acknowledged. William, not unnaturally, took no heed of Anselm’s personal obligations. Whatever the Abbot of Bec might have done, neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor any other English subject could acknowledge any Pope without the King’s leave. After all, Anselm’s acknowledgement of Urban had not yet gone further than speaking of him as Pope. He had had no dealings with him of any kind. He indeed proposed to do an act which would have been the fullest acknowledgement of Urban’s claims. But he had proposed to do it only with the King’s leave. What he should do in case the King refused to give him leave to go, he had not said, very likely he had not settled in his own mind. He would do nothing contrary to his obedience to Urban; but as yet his obedience to Urban was wholly in theory. The King’s words now made it a practical question; any kind of adhesion to Urban was declared by the King’s own mouth to be inconsistent with the duties of one who was the man of the King of England.

Twofold duty of the Archbishop. Anselm, it is plain, was most anxious to do his duty alike as churchman and as subject. He saw no kind of inconsistency between the two. No such questions had been raised in the days of Lanfranc, and he had not done, or proposed to do, anything but what Lanfranc had done before him. Reasonably enough, he was not prepared to admit the King’s interpretation of the law which declared that he could not be the friend at once of Urban and of William. He asks for an assembly to discuss the question. And, in a thoroughly constitutional spirit, he demanded that the question should be referred to a lawful assembly of the kingdom. Let the bishops, abbots, and lay nobles come together, and let them decide whether the two duties were so inconsistent with each other as the King said they were.[1329] By their 486 judgement on the point of law he would abide. Anselm’s purposes. If they ruled that it was as the King said, that obedience to Urban was inconsistent with allegiance to William, then he would shape his own course accordingly. He will leave the realm if he may not acknowledge Urban. If such should be their verdict, he could not abide in the land without either openly throwing off the obedience of Urban or else openly breaking his duty as subject and liegeman to William. He would do neither. In such a case he would leave the realm till such time as the King should acknowledge Urban.[1330] By that means he would avoid all breach of either duty. The case might well have been argued on another ground, whether it was not being righteous overmuch to bring back again, for the sake of a technical scruple of any kind, all the evils which would at once follow if the land were again left without an archbishop. Anselm’s answer would doubtless have been that he could not do evil that good might come. And it would be much clearer to the mind of Anselm than it would have been to the mind of any native Englishman that a withdrawal of obedience from Urban was the doing of evil. The feelings of Aosta, even the feelings of Bec, were not quite at home in the air of Gillingham. But the bringing in of foreign ideas, feelings, and scruples, was one of the necessary consequences of foreign conquest. Anselm obeyed his own conscience, and his conscience taught him as a 487 conscience schooled at Aosta and Bec could not fail to teach him.

Frequency of assemblies under Rufus. To Anselm’s proposal for referring the matter to the Witan of the kingdom William made no objection. The Red King seems never to have had any objection to meeting either his great men or the general mass of his subjects. He was in truth so strong that every gathering of the kind became little more than a display of his power. But it is not easy to see why the question could not have been kept open till the ordinary Easter Gemót. Easter Gemót. March 25, 1095. That Gemót was held this year at Winchester, and, as we shall see in another chapter, matters of no small moment had to be treated in it. The King’s authority was beginning to be defied in northern England, and at this Easter it had to be asserted. A special meeting summoned. But, for whatever reason, it was determined that a special assembly should be summoned a fortnight before the regular meeting at Winchester, for the discussion of the particular point which had been raised between the King and the Archbishop. It illustrates the way in which the kings and great men of that time were always moving from place to place that a spot was chosen for the special meeting, far away from the spot where William and Anselm then were, far away from the place where the regular assembly was to be held so soon after. Gillingham and Winchester were comparatively near to each other; Assembly of Rockingham. March 11, 1095. but the assembly which was to give a legal judgement as to Anselm’s conflicting duties was summoned to meet on the second Sunday before Easter at the royal castle of Rockingham on the borders of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, a place which had at least the merit of being one of the most central in England.

In the question which was now to be argued, there can be little doubt that the King was technically in the 488 right, as the law was understood in his father’s time. The King technically right. By the custom of the Conqueror’s reign, no Pope could be acknowledged without the King’s leave; and, though Anselm had not taken any active or public step in acknowledgement of Urban, he had acknowledged him in words spoken to the King himself, and he had declared that he would not on any account withdraw his obedience from Urban. Moral estimate of his conduct. At the same time one can hardly conceive a more pettifogging way of interpreting the law, or a meaner way of abusing a legal power. There was no reasonable ground for refusing to acknowledge Urban, except on the theory that the deposition of Gregory and the election of Clement were valid. Urban represented the claims of Gregory; Clement still lived to assert his own claims. But though Lanfranc had used cautious language about the dispute,[1331] England and her King had never thought of acknowledging Clement or of withdrawing their allegiance from Gregory. Gregory had been the Conqueror’s Pope, as long as the two great ones both lived. Position of the rival Popes. And, if Clement’s election was void from the beginning, Gregory’s death could not make his right any better. Victor had succeeded Gregory, and Urban had succeeded Victor. There could be no excuse for objecting to Urban, except on a ground which William Rufus might have been glad to take up, but which he could not take up with any decency. He might, not unreasonably from his own point of view, have thrown himself into the Imperial cause, as the common cause of princes. But he could not do this without throwing blame on the conduct of his father. Or again, if he had tried, in any legal or regular way, either to limit the papal power like Henry the Second, or to cast it off altogether like Henry the Eighth, we at least, as we read the story, could not have blamed him.489 But it was not in the nature of William Rufus to do anything in a legal or regular way. It was not in him to take up any really intelligible counter position, either by getting rid of Popes altogether or by acknowledging the Imperial Pope. It is true that he might have found it hard to carry with him even his servile prelates, still harder to carry his lay nobles, in either of those courses. But then it was just as little in him honestly to take the third course which was open to him, by frankly acknowledging Urban. William’s treatment of the question. It pleased him better to play tricks with his claim to acknowledge popes, just as he played tricks with his claim to appoint bishops and abbots. To keep the question open, to give no reason on either side, but practically to hinder the acknowledgement of any pope, was a more marked exercise of his own arbitrary will than if he had ruled the disputed question either way. But, just as he was ready to fill up a bishopric as soon as he thought it worth his while in point of money, so he was quite ready to acknowledge a pope as soon as it seemed worth his while to do so, in point either of policy or of spite. No real objection to Urban on his part. All this while he had not the slightest real objection to acknowledge Urban. Either now or very soon after, he was actually intriguing with Urban, in hopes of carrying his point against Anselm by his means.

And now the Assembly came together which was to declare the law of England as to the point in dispute between Anselm and the King. Position of Rockingham. It was not gathered in any of the great cities, or under the shadow of any of the great minsters, of the realm. Nor yet was it gathered, as some councils were gathered before and after, in one of those spots which were simply the seats of the King’s silvan pleasures. Rockingham, placed on the edge of the forest which bears its name, the wooded 490 ground between the sluggish streams of Nen and Welland, was preeminently a hunting-seat; but it was not merely a hunting-seat; it was also a fortress. History of the place. As in so many cases, the Norman, in this case the Conqueror himself, had seized and adapted to his own use the home and the works of the Englishman. On a height just within the borders of Northamptonshire, looking forth across the valley of the Welland over the Danish land to the north, the Englishman Bofig had in King Eadward’s days held sac and soc in his lordship of Rockingham. His dwelling-place, like those of other English thegns, crowned a mound on a site strong by nature, and which the skill of Norman engineers was to change into a site strong by art. In the havoc which fell upon Northampton, borough and shire, when William went forth to subdue the Mercian land,[1332] the home of Bofig had become waste; and on that waste spot the King The castle. ordered a castle to be built.[1333] At Rockingham, as almost everywhere else, we find works earlier and later than the time of our story, but nothing that we can positively assign to the days of either William. There is no keep, as at Bridgenorth and at Oxford, which we can assign to any of the known actors in our tale. The mound of Bofig is yoked on to a series of buildings of various dates, from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. But we can still trace the line of the walls and ditches which the Conqueror or his successors added as new defences to the primitive mound and its primitive ditch. Art and nature together have made the site almost peninsular; but a considerable space, occupied by the parish church 491 and by the town which has sunk to a village, lies between the castle and the stream that flows beneath the height. Description of the site. The site is a lordly one, and is almost the more striking because it commands no other great object such as those which are commanded by those castles which were raised to protect or to keep down a city. When the forest was still a forest in every sense of the word, the aspect of the castle of Rockingham, one of the wilder retreats of English kingship, must have been at once lonelier and busier than it is now.

Meeting of the Assembly. March 11, 1095. At Rockingham then the Assembly met, a fortnight before Easter. The immediate place of meeting was the church within the castle.[1334] The church has perished, but its probable site may be traced among the buildings to the north of the mound. But it is hard to understand Place of meeting; the castle-chapel.how the narrow space of a castle-chapel could hold the great gathering which came together at Rockingham. The King and his immediate counsellors sat apart in a separate chamber, while outside were a numerous body, The King’s inner council. which is also spoken of as a vast crowd of monks, clerks, and laymen.[1335] It may be that, according to an arrangement which is sometimes found elsewhere, but of which there is no present trace at Rockingham, the great hall opened into the chapel, so that, while the church was formally the place of meeting, the greater space of the hall would be open to receive the overflowing crowd.[1336] Early hours of the assembly. The time of meeting was the early 492 morning; a midnight sitting of the Wise Men was an unknown thing in those days. The King sat within in the outer space, whatever was its nature, Anselm’s opening speech. Anselm addressed the assembly, calling forth the bishops and lords from the presence-chamber to hear him. We must remember that, in the absence of the King, he was the first man in the Assembly and its natural leader. He laid his case before his hearers. He had asked leave of the King to go to Pope Urban for his pallium. The King had told him that to acknowledge Urban or any one else as Pope without his leave was the same thing as trying to take his crown from him. The King had added that faith to him and obedience to Urban were two things which could not go together; Anselm could not practise both at once. It was this point which the Assembly had come together to decide; it was on this point that their counsel was needed. He states his case. He bade his hearers remember that he had not sought the archbishopric, that in truth he would gladly have been burned alive rather than take it.[1337] They had themselves forced him into the office—​the bishops certainly had in a literal and even physical sense. It was for them now to help him with their counsel, to lessen thereby the burthen which they themselves had laid on his shoulder.[1338] He appealed to all, he specially appealed to his brother bishops, to weigh the matter carefully, and to decide. Could he at once keep his plighted faith 493 to the King and his plighted obedience to the Pope? It was a grave matter to sin against either duty. Could not both duties be observed without any breach of either?

The real point avoided on the King’s side. This was indeed the question which the Assembly was brought together to consider and to decide. The meeting had been called, at Anselm’s own request, to inform him on the point of law, whether he could acknowledge Urban without disloyalty to William. But during a long debate of two days, that real issue is never touched, till Anselm himself calls back men’s minds to the real object of their coming together. Assumption of the King’s party against Anselm. It is assumed throughout by the King and the King’s party that the point of law is already settled in the sense unfavourable to Anselm, that Anselm has done something contrary to his allegiance to the King, that He is treated as an accused person. he is there as an accused man for trial, almost as a convicted man for sentence. That he is a member of the Assembly, the highest subject in the Assembly, that the whole object of the meeting is to decide a question in which the King and his highest subject understand the law in different ways, seems not to come into the head of any of the King’s immediate counsellors. Conduct of the bishops. Least of all does it come into the heads of the bishops, the class of men who play the most prominent and the least creditable part in the story.

Answer of the bishops. To Anselm’s question then the bishops were the first to make answer. They are spoken of throughout as acting in a body; but they must have had some spokesman. That spokesman could not have been the Bishop of Durham, who must surely have been sitting with the King in his inner council. William of Saint-Calais comes on the scene afterwards, but no bishop is mentioned by name at this stage. The answer of the episcopal body was not cheering. The Archbishop had no need of their 494 counsel. He was a man prudent in God and a lover of goodness, and could settle such points better than they could. If he would throw himself wholly on the King’s will, then they would give him their advice;[1339] or they would, if he wished, go in and report his words to the King. The meeting adjourned till Monday. They did so; and Rufus, with a scruple which one would rather have looked for from Anselm, ordered that, as the day was Sunday, the discussion should be adjourned to the morrow. Anselm was to go to his own quarters, and to appear again in the morning. One might like to know where, not only the Archbishop, but the whole host of visitors at times like this, found quarters. Unless they were all the King’s guests in the castle, and Meeting of Monday, March 12.filled its nooks and corners how they might, it must have been much harder to find lodgings at Rockingham than it was at Gloucester. Monday morning came; Anselm, with his faithful reporter Eadmer, went to the place of meeting. Anselm and the bishops. Sitting in the midst of the whole Assembly,[1340] he told the bishops, as it would seem, that he was ready to receive the advice which he had asked for yesterday. They counsel unreserved submission. They again answered that they had nothing to say but what they had said yesterday; they had no advice to give him, unless he was ready to throw himself wholly on the King’s will. If he drew distinctions and reservations, if he pleaded any call on behalf of God to do anything against the King’s will, they would give him no help.[1341] So low had the prelacy of England fallen under 495 the administration of Rufus and Flambard. Position of the bishops. Neither as priests of God, nor as Witan of the realm, nor simply as freemen of the land, was there any strength or counsel in them. Their answer seems almost to imply that they cast aside the common decencies, not only of prelates but of Christian men, that they fully accepted the ruling of their sovereign, that the will of God was not to be put into comparison with the will of the King. Anselm makes no exclusive claims. Anselm is not doing like some before and after him, not even like his chief enemy in the present gathering. He is not asserting any special privilege for his order; he is not appealing from a court within the realm to any foreign jurisdiction. He asks for counsel how he may reconcile his duty to God with his duty to the King; and the answer he gets is that he has nothing to do but to submit to the King’s will; the law of God, and seemingly the law of England with it, are to go for nothing. But there was at least some shame left in them; when they had given their answer, they held their peace and hung down their heads, as if waiting for what Anselm might lay upon them.[1342] His second speech. Then the Primate spoke, seemingly not rising from his seat, but with uplifted eyes, with solemn voice, with a face all alive with feeling.[1343] He looked at the chiefs of Church and State, prelates and nobles, and told them that if they, shepherds and princes,[1344] could give no counsel save according to the will of one man, he must betake him to the Shepherd and Prince of all. That Shepherd and 496 Prince had given a charge and authority to Peter first, and after him to the other Apostles, to the Vicar of Peter first and after him to all other bishops, a charge and authority which He had not given to any temporal prince, Count, Duke, King, or Emperor.[1345] His two duties. He owed a duty to his temporal prince, for the Lord had bidden him to render to Cæsar the things that were Cæsar’s. But he was bidden also to render to God the things that were God’s. He would, to the best of his power, obey both commands. He must give obedience to the Vicar of Peter in the things of God; in those things which belonged to the earthly dignity of his lord the King, he would ever give his lord his faithful counsel and help, according to the measure of his power.