Chapter IV · (continued 5)

Peace between Robert and William. The other object for which Jeronto came to England was fully carried out, whether Jeronto himself had any real hand in bringing it about or not. Peace was made between the Duke of the Normans and the King of the English. Normandy pledged to William. 1096. In order that Robert might have money to go to the crusade, the duchy of Normandy was pledged to his brother for a sum of ten thousand marks. The transaction was not a cession or a sale; it was a mere pledge. The duchy was to pass to William merely for a season, for three years, or for so long a time as Robert should be away. If the Duke should come back, and should find himself able to pay the money, the duchy was to be his again.[1509] Still William’s possession seemed likely to be a lasting one. There seemed but small chance of Robert’s 556 ever coming back, and smaller still of his coming back with ten thousand marks to spare out of the spoils of the infidels. If he ever did come so laden, William Rufus doubtless trusted that, by some means either of force or of fraud, his brother’s restoration to his duchy might be either evaded or withstood.

The price not large. The price for which Normandy was thus handed over does not, when compared with other payments of the time, seem a large one. It was not very much higher than the sums which Herbert Losinga was said to have paid for a bishopric for himself and an abbey for his father.[1510] The price to be paid for at least a three years’ possession of all Normandy was not much more than three times the sum which courtiers at least had looked on as a reasonable contribution for an Archbishop of Canterbury to make towards a single Norman expedition.[1511] Heavy taxation to raise the money. Yet the sum which was now to be paid is spoken of as a drain upon the whole kingdom. Rufus had no thought of paying the money out of any rightful revenues of the crown or out of any stores which he had already wrung from his people. Something was to be wrung from them yet again for the special object of the moment. The time would seem to have been the summer of the year which followed the gathering at Clermont, the year which in England began with the death of Bishop William of Durham and the frightful punishment of Count William of Eu. Whitsun Assembly, 1096. The matter may have been discussed at the Whitsun Assembly of that year, of which we have no record. At any rate a heavy tax was laid on the whole kingdom; we may be sure that the Red King took the occasion to wring more out of the land than the actual sum which he had to pay to his brother. Otherwise, except on the view that everything had been taken already, the payment of a sum less than 557 seven thousand pounds could hardly have weighed on the whole kingdom as this benevolence is said to have weighed. Extortion of the benevolence. For a benevolence it was, at least in form; men were invited to give or to lend; but we gather that some more stringent means was found for those who failed to give or to lend willingly.[1512] The English Chronicler sends up his wail for the heavy time that it was by reason of the manifold gelds, and he tells us how, as so often happened, hunger followed in the wake of the extortioner.[1513] Other writers describe the King as demanding loans and gifts from his prelates, earls, and other great men. Oppression of tenants. The great lay lords, we are told, raised their share by the plunder of the knights who held fiefs of them and of the churls who tilled their demesne lands.[1514] It is the cry of these last that we hear through the voice of the Chronicler. Protest of the prelates. The bishops and abbots are said to have made a protest, a thing which almost passes belief on the part of the bishops of the Red King’s day. When called on for their shares, they are said to have answered, in the spirit, or at least in the words, of Ælfheah, that they could not raise the money by any means save the oppression of the wretched tillers of the earth.[1515] Judged by the conduct of the two classes at Rockingham, the prelates and the lay barons seem to have changed places. Comparison of the prelates and the lay lords. It is the churchmen now who have the conscientious scruple. Yet the difference is not wonderful. The barons were used to general havoc and violence of every kind; 558 what they scrupled at was the deliberate perversion of formal justice to crush a single man who claimed their reverence on every ground, official and personal. The prelates, on the other hand, might be ready for any amount of cringing and cowardice, and might yet shrink from being made the agents of direct oppression in their own persons. Anyhow another means of payment was suggested by the cunning agents of the impious King. It may have been the future Bishop of Durham who answered, “Have ye not chests full of the bones of dead men, but wrought about with gold and silver?”[1516] Plunder of the churches.In this strait the churchmen took the sacrilegious hint. The most sacred objects were not spared; books of the gospels, shrines, crucifixes, were spoiled of their precious ornaments, chalices were melted down, all the gifts of the bounty of the old time were seized on, not to relieve the poor, but to fill the coffers of the King with the money that was needed for his ambitious schemes.[1517]

In all this we have learned to suspect some exaggeration; extreme measures taken at some particular places must have been spoken of as if they had been universal throughout the land. In one case, and that the case of the highest personal interest, we get the details, and they are a good deal less frightful than the general picture. Contribution of Anselm. Among the other great men of the land, the Archbishop of Canterbury was called on for his contribution. His friends advised compliance with the request, and he himself did not complain of it as 559 unreasonable.[1518] But Anselm had no great store of money in hand. He consulted the Bishops of Winchester and Rochester, Walkelin and Gundulf, and by their advice he borrowed a sum of money from the hoard of his monks, who seem to have been better provided than himself. He mortgages the manor of Peckham to his monks. The convent, by a vote of the majority, agreed to help the Archbishop with a present sum of two hundred pounds, in return for which Anselm made over to them for seven years his manor of Peckham, which brought in thirty pounds yearly. The money supplied by the monks, together with what Anselm could raise himself, made up a sum which seems to have satisfied the King; at least no complaint or dispute is recorded.[1519]

The ten thousand marks were raised and paid. We may well believe that more than the ten thousand marks were raised; but we may be sure that not a penny more than his bargain entitled him to found its way into the hands of Duke Robert. In September the whole business was finished. Conference between William and Robert. King William crossed the sea, and met his brother in a conference held under the mediation of the King of the French, at some point of the border-land of the Vexin, at Pontoise or at Chaumont, places of which we shall have to speak again.[1520] 560 The money was paid to the Duke; the duchy was handed over to the King, Robert sets forth on the Crusade. September, 1096. His companions, Robert, Stephen, and Odo. and Robert of Normandy set forth for the holy war. He went in company with his cousin the Count of Flanders and his brother-in-law the Count of Chartres. And with them went a kinsman of an elder generation, whose long history, though not specially long life, is now drawing to an end. Bishop Odo of Bayeux could not bear to stay in Normandy again to become a subject of the nephew to whom he had surrendered himself at Rochester.[1521] He joined the forces of his elder nephew, and with him went the eloquent Bishop of Evreux, Gilbert, who had preached the funeral sermon of the Conqueror.[1522] Conduct of Robert.The Duke on his armed pilgrimage showed new powers. He could now, often but not always, overcome his love of idleness and pleasure, and whenever the moment of real danger came, he was ever foremost, not only in the mere daring of the soldier, but in the skill and counsel of the commander.[1523] Another hand has traced his course with all 561 vividness, but with less sympathy than one could have wished for the general objects of the holy war.[1524] A few points in Robert’s eastern career are all that need now be touched on. He and his companions passed by Lucca, and there received the blessing of the orthodox Pope Urban.[1525] Robert at Rome. They went on to what should have been Urban’s see, and found how truly the English Chronicler spoke when he said that Urban nothing had of the settle at Rome. When they went to pay their devotions in the basilica of Saint Peter, they met with much such entertainment from the followers of the schismatic Clement as the monks of Glastonbury had met with from their abbot Thurstan.[1526] His reception by Roger of Apulia. They reached southern Italy, now a duchy of the house of Hauteville, and the reigning Duke Roger, son of the renowned Wiscard, is said to have welcomed his natural lord in the head of the ducal house of his ancestral land.[1527]

At the time of their coming, Duke Roger, his uncle Count Roger of Sicily, who had won back a realm for Christendom, and his brother Bohemond—​Mark Bohemond 562 we find him accurately called[1528]—​were warring Siege of Amalfi. against the famous merchant town of Amalfi,[1529] rebellious in their eyes against the Norman Duke, in its own eyes loyal to the Eastern Emperor. Bohemond takes the cross. At the coming of the crusaders Bohemond took the cross, and rent up a goodly cloak into crosses for his followers.[1530] Count Roger was left almost alone to besiege Amalfi, and he went back to his own island. The crusaders winter in Apulia. 1096–1097. Yet, after this outburst of pious zeal, those who were highest in rank among the warriors of the cross tarried to spend a merry winter in that pleasant land, while many of the lower sort, already weary of the work, turned aside and went back to their homes.[1531] The Norman prelates, from whatever motives, crossed to the great island of the Mediterranean, a trophy of Norman victory only second to the yet greater island of the Ocean. There, under the rule of the Great Count of Sicily, the whilom Earl of Kent might see how conquerors of his own blood could deal 563 with the men of conquered lands after another sort from that in which he had dealt with the men of his English earldom. There, in the happy city of the threefold speech,[1532] the Bishop of Bayeux might mark, in the great temple of Palermo, once church, then mosque, and now church once more, those forms of art of the Greek and the Saracen, which had lost in grace, if they had gained in strength, in taking the shapes which he had himself followed in his great work in his own Saxon city. Odo dies at Palermo. February, 1097. There the Earl and Bishop at last ended a career of which Kent and Bayeux could tell so different a tale. Gilbert of Evreux discharged the last corporal work of mercy for his fiercer brother; and the tomb of Odo of Bayeux arose within the walls of the great church of Palermo, soon to boast itself the head of the Sicilian realm.[1533] And, after all the changes of later days, amid the small remains which the barbarians of the Renaissance have left us of the church of English Walter, we may, even beside the tomb of the Wonder of the World, stop for a moment to remember that the brother of our Conqueror, the scourge of our land, found his last resting-place so far away alike from Bayeux, from Senlac, and from Rochester.

Duke Robert crosses to Dyrrhachion. The Bishop went no further than Palermo; the Duke went on by the course which the warfare of the Apulian Normans had lately made familiar. They entered the Eastern world at Dyrrhachion, where the valour of Normans and Englishmen had been lately proved.[1534] Use of the Bulgarian name. They passed, in the geography of our authors, through Bulgaria;[1535] that is, they passed through those Illyrian and 564 Macedonian lands where the rule of Byzantium had again displaced the rule of Ochrida, but to which the name of the people whom Samuel had made terrible still clave, as in the language of fact, though not of diplomacy, it cleaves still. They reached Thessalonica, they reached Constantinople, and wondered at the glories of the New Rome.[1536] Robert does homage to Alexios. There, as in duty bound, they pledged their faith to the truest heir of the Roman majesty, whose lost lands they were to win back from the misbelievers. Before the throne of Alexios Robert the Norman knelt; he placed his hands between the Imperial hands, and arose the sworn liegeman of Augustus.[1537] The homage of Harold to Robert’s father was not more binding than the homage of Robert to Alexios; but an English earl and a Norman crusader were measured in those days by different standards. The host passed on; at Nikaia, at Antioch, at Jerusalem, Robert was ever foremost in fight and in council. Yet the old spirit was not wholly cast out. Robert at Laodikeia. When the English Warangians at Laodikeia hailed their joint leaders in the son of their Conqueror and in the heir of their ancient kings,[1538] 565 the pleasures of Asia, like the pleasures of Apulia, were too much for the Duke, and it needed the anathemas of the Church to call him back from his luxurious holiday to the stern work that was before him.[1539] Before the walls of Jerusalem he found a strange ally. Hugh of Jaugy joins the crusades. Hugh of Jaugy, one of the murderers of Mabel, after his long sojourn among the infidels, greeted his natural prince, returned to his allegiance, and by his knowledge of the tongue and ways of those whom he forsook, did useful, if not honourable, service.[1540] A worthier comrade was a noble and valiant Turk, who of his own accord came to seek for baptism and for admission to share the perils of the pilgrims.[1541] The Norman Duke ever appears as the fellow-soldier of his kinsman and namesake of Flanders; the two Roberts are always side by side. The “rope-dancers” at Antioch. It is needless to say that neither of them shared in that shameful descent from the walls of Antioch which gained for some of the heroes of Normandy the mocking surname of the rope-dancers.[1542] It is hard to find any absolutely contemporary 566 authority for the statement which was very soon afloat, Robert said to have refused the crown of Jerusalem. that the crown of Jerusalem was offered to Robert and was refused by him.[1543] Robert could not have been as Godfrey; but we can believe that his career would have been more honourable in a Syrian than in a Norman dominion. He was at least one of the first to stand on the rescued walls of the Holy City;[1544] and in the fight for the newly-won realm against the Fatimite Caliph, it was not merely by cutting down the Saracen standard-bearer with his own hand, but by a display of really skilful tactics, that Robert did much to win the day for Christendom.[1545] His return. He then turned his face towards Constantinople and towards Apulia, and we shall meet him again in his own land.

William takes possession of Normandy. As soon as Robert had set forth for Jerusalem, William took possession of the duchy of Normandy—​in modern phrase, he took upon him its administration—​without opposition from any side. There was indeed no side, except the side of mere anarchy, from which opposition could come. It was perhaps a little humiliating for a great duchy to be handed over from one prince to another by a personal bargain, like a house or a field. But there 567 was no practical ground for opposing William’s entry. All classes, save mere robbers, lordly or vulgar, must have had enough of Robert. And now Robert was gone, and in going, he had handed them over to the prince for whom many of them had fought or intrigued, and who already held some of the most important points of the country. Whether it was good or bad for England and Normandy to have the same ruler, it was clearly a gain for all Normandy to have only one ruler. In one sense indeed this object was not even now attained. William’s first step was to dismember the duchy which he had bought. Grants to Henry. Henry, it will be remembered, had been left in Normandy a year and a half before, and had been, perhaps ever since, acting in William’s interests against Robert. He now received the reward of his services in a noble fief indeed. He became again acknowledged Count of the whole Côtentin. And to his peninsular dominion he was allowed to add the whole Bessin, except the city of Bayeux and the castle and town of Caen.[1546] The spot which contained the foundations of his parents, the tombs of his parents, William Rufus could not bring himself to give up, even to reward the faithful service of a brother.

But for Henry, in full friendship with his brother, to hold a corner of Normandy as a fief of his brother was a partition of Normandy of quite another kind from such a partition as had been when William, as Robert’s enemy, hemmed in Robert in his capital. Rule of William in Normandy. There can be no doubt that the exchange from Robert to William was an unspeakable gain to the duchy. During the remainder of the life of Rufus Normandy had a stern master; but, after the anarchy of Robert, what the land most needed 568 was a master of almost any kind. Synod of Rouen. 1096. The kind of work which was needed is shown in the acts of a synod which had been gathered at Rouen by Archbishop William, while Robert still nominally ruled, almost immediately after the greater gathering at Clermont. Three Norman bishops had been at Clermont in person, Odo of Bayeux, Gilbert of Evreux, and Serlo of Seez. They brought back the decrees of the council to their brethren, who forthwith assembled to accept and enforce in their own province all that had been ordered at Clermont for the Church and the world in general. Truce of God confirmed. They confirmed the Truce of God[1547] with all its enactments on behalf of the more useful and helpless members of society. They drew up an oath to be taken under pain of anathema by all men, which bound them to observe the Truce in their own persons, and to give the help of the temporal arm to the efforts of the ecclesiastical powers against those who should break it.[1548] In those days at least peace could be had only through war, and the Truce of God itself became the occasion of more fighting against those who scorned its wholesome checks. Other decrees. Other anathemas were pronounced against robbers, false moneyers, and buyers of stolen goods, against those who gathered themselves together in castles for purposes of plunder, and against the lords who sheltered such men in their castles. Such castles were put under an interdict; no Christian rite might be done in them.[1549] In going on to pronounce 569 further anathemas against the invaders of ecclesiastical rights, against the unlawful occupiers of Church lands, against laymen who claimed to have a right in tithes and other Church dues,[1550] the synod uses a formula which shows how keenly Normandy felt the difference between the great William and his eldest son. The days of King William. What the days of the Confessor were in England, the days of the Conqueror were in his own duchy. The synod decreed that all churches should enjoy their goods and customs as they had been in the time of King William, and that no burthens should be laid upon them but such as King William had allowed.[1551]

It would be too much to think that William the Red at once brought back the Norman duchy to the state in which it had been in those golden days of William the Great. And it is still less needful to stop to prove that even the days of William the Great would not have seemed golden days as compared with the state of any well-governed land in our own time. But there can be no doubt that the coming of the new ruler wrought a real reform. And a reform was grievously needed. Small results of the synod. We read that very little came of the well-intentioned decrees of the synod. The bishops, Odo among them, did what they could—​it is Odo’s last recorded act in the lands with which we have to deal, and it is something that he leaves us in the shape of a reformer and not in that of an oppressor. But very little came of the efforts of the prelates. The Duke did nothing to help them—​his mind was perhaps too full of the crusade—​and things were at the moment of William’s coming in almost greater confusion than 570 ever.[1552] William’s rule in Normandy. He at least gave the land the advantage of a strong rule; he kept the luxury of oppression to himself. The lesser scourges of mankind were thoroughly put down. We hear no more of that private warfare which had torn the land in pieces in the days of Robert. William recalled many of the lavish grants of Robert; what his father had held, he would hold.[1553] Even in ecclesiastical matters Rufus is not painted in such dark colours in Normandy as he is in England. His appointments to prelacies. He is not charged with keeping ecclesiastical benefices vacant in order that he might enjoy their revenues. He found two great abbeys vacant, those of Jumièges and Saint Peter-on-Dives; and he at once supplied them with abbots. They were abbots of his own choosing, but it is not said that they bought their places.[1554] Tancard Abbot of Jumièges. 1096–1101. Tancard, the new abbot of Jumièges, may lie under some suspicion, as a few years after he was deposed on account of a shameful quarrel with his monks.[1555] Saint Peter’s was vacant, not by the death, but by the deposition and banishment—​unjust we are told—​of its abbot Fulk. Etard Abbot of Saint Peter’s. 1096–1107. William appointed a monk of Jumièges called Etard or Walter, who ruled well, we are told, for eleven years, till Fulk came back with letters from the Pope, on which his successor cheerfully made way for him again.[1556] No Norman bishopric was vacant at the time of William’s entry, nor did any become vacant for more than a year. February, 1098. Then in the midst of events which are to be told hereafter, the news came 571 that the throne of Bayeux was vacant by the death of Odo far away at Palermo. William at once bestowed the staff on Turold the brother of Hugh of Evermouth, seemingly the same Hugh who figures in the legend of Hereward as his son-in-law and successor.[1557] Turold Bishop of Bayeux. 1098–1195. This prelate sat for seven years, and then, for reasons of his own, gave up his see, and became a monk at Bec.[1558]

§ 7. The Last Dispute between William and Anselm. 1097.

Christmas, 1096–1097. The year which followed William’s acquisition of Normandy was a busy year in many ways. The King passed the winter in the duchy; the greater part of the year he spent in England. He was largely occupied with the affairs of Wales and Scotland, and in this year came the last dispute between the King and the Archbishop, and the first departure of Anselm from England. Since their reconciliation at Windsor two years before, there had been no open breach between them. State of Wales at the end of 1096. The first difference arose out of the events of the Welsh war. At the end of the year which saw William master of Normandy, he seemed to have wholly lost his hold on Wales. Except Glamorgan and the one isolated castle of Pembroke, the Britons seemed to have won back their whole land.[1559] The affairs of Wales brought the King Easter, April 5, 1097. William comes to England. back from Normandy, and he designed to hold the Easter Gemót in its usual place at Winchester. Stress of weather however hindered him from reaching England in time for the festival. He landed at Arundel on Easter 572 eve, and thence went to Windsor, where the Assembly Assembly of Windsor.was therefore held, somewhat later than the usual time.[1560] The meeting was followed by a great expedition into Wales, Seeming conquest of Wales.and by a submission of the country which events a few months later proved to be very nominal indeed.[1561] But there was at last an apparent success. William seemed to be greater than ever; he had, by whatever means, won Normandy and recovered Wales. And, more than this, the beginnings of his Norman government had been good; he had thus far shown himself a better nursing-father of the Church in his duchy than his brother Robert had done. Good hopes for the future. A hope therefore arose in many minds that the days of victory and peace might be days of reformed government in England also, and that King and Primate might be able to join in some great measure for the improvement of discipline and manners.[1562] In this hope they were disappointed, as they were likely to be, especially if they reckoned on any long time of peace with the Britons. But the first renewed breach between the King and the Archbishop arose from quite a new cause. William complains of Anselm’s contingent to the Welsh war. When the King came back from the Welsh war, he sent a letter to Anselm, angrily complaining of the nature of the Archbishop’s military contingent to his army. The knights whom Anselm had sent had been so badly equipped and so useless in war that he owed him no thanks for 573 them but rather the contrary.[1563] This story is commonly told as if Anselm had been the colonel of a regiment whose men were, through his fault, utterly unfit for service. Anselm had indeed, as we have seen, once held somewhat of a warlike command, but it had been of a passive kind; Estimate of the complaint. he was certainly not expected to go to the Welsh war himself. In truth the complaint is against knights; doubtless, if the knights were bad, their followers would be worse; but it is of knights that the King speaks. Position of the Archbishop’s knights. If I rightly understand the relation between the Archbishop and his military tenants, these knights were men who held lands of the archbishopric by the tenure of discharging all the military service to which the whole estates of the archbishopric were bound.[1564] It was doubtless the business of their lord to see that the service was paid, that the proper number of knights, each with his proper number of followers, went to the royal standard. But one can hardly think that it was part of the Archbishop’s business to look into every military detail, as if he had been their commanding officer. It was not Anselm’s business to find their arms and accoutrements; they held their lands by the tenure of finding such things for themselves. The King was dissatisfied with the archiepiscopal contingent, and, from his point of view, most likely not without reason. Anselm’s troops might be expected to be among the least serviceable parts of the army. Gentlemen and yeomen of Kent—​we may begin to use those familiar names—​could have had no great experience of warfare; there were no private wars to keep their hands in practice; they could not be so well fitted for 574 war in general or specially for Welsh war, either as the picked mercenaries of the King or as the tried followers of the Earl of Chester and the Lord of Glamorgan. William, as a military commander, might naturally be annoyed at the poor figure cut by the Archbishop’s knights; but there is every reason to think that, in point of law, his complaint against the Archbishop was unjust. It seems to be shown to be so by the fact that the charge which the King brought against Anselm on this account was one which in the end he found it better to drop. Anselm summoned to the King’s court. But he now bade Anselm to be ready to do right to him, according to the judgement of his court, whenever he should think fit to summon him for that end.[1565]

Anselm’s distress. Anselm seems to have been thoroughly disheartened by this fresh blow. And yet it was no more than what he had been looking for. Over and over again he had said that between him and William there could be no lasting peace, that under such a king as William there could be no real reform.[1566] And the new grievance was a personal one; whether the charge was right or wrong, it had nothing to do with the interests of the Church or with good morals; it simply touched his relations to the King as his temporal lord. Since the meeting at Windsor two years before, though William had given Anselm no kind of help in his plans, he does not seem to have openly thwarted them, except, as seems implied throughout, by still refusing his leave for the holding of a synod. His weariness of England. At the same time there had been quite enough to make Anselm thoroughly weary of England and her King and of everything to do with her. And the visits of the Cardinal of Albano and the Abbot 575 of Saint Benignus had done Anselm no good. Change in Anselm’s feelings. From this time we mark the beginning of a certain change in him which, without in any way morally blaming him, we must call a change for the worse. Left to himself, he seems not to have had the faintest scruple as to the customs which were established alike in England and in Normandy. He was unwilling to accept the metropolitan office at all; but he made no objection to the particular way of receiving it which was the use of England and of Normandy. He had, without scruple or protest, received the staff of Canterbury from the son as he had received the staff of Bec from the father. His wish to go to Rome to receive the pallium was fully according to precedent, and it was only the petty captiousness of the King that turned it into a matter of offence. His yearnings towards Rome. But the mere talking about Rome and the Pope which the discussion had led to was not wholesome; and everything that had since happened had tended to put Rome and the Pope more and more into Anselm’s head. The coming of the Legate, the rebukes of the Legate, even the base insinuations of his undutiful suffragans against the validity of his appointment, would all help to bring about a certain morbid frame of mind, a craving after Rome and its Bishop as the one centre of shelter and comfort among his troubles. The very failure of Walter’s mission, the unworthy greediness and subserviency into which the Legate had fallen, the utter break-down of the later mission of Abbot Jeronto, would all tend the same way. Anselm would hold, not that the Pope was corrupt, but that none but the Pope in his own person could be trusted. He would have nothing more to do with his unfaithful agents; he would go himself to the fountain-head which could not fail him. And he to whom he would go was not simply the Pope, any Pope; it was Urban the Second, the reformer, the preacher of 576 the crusade. Personal position of Urban. Since Anselm’s work had begun, the world had been filled with the personal fame of the Pontiff in whose cause he had striven. In the same council which had stirred the common heart of Christendom Urban had denounced those customs of England to which Anselm had conformed in his own appointment and which he had promised to defend against all men. The rules laid down at Clermont against the acceptance of ecclesiastical benefices from lay hands not only condemned his own appointment, made before those decrees were issued; it condemned also the consecrations to the sees of Hereford and Worcester which he had himself performed since they had been issued. Amid the reign of unlaw, amid the constant breaches of discipline, the frightful sins against moral right, which he had daily to behold and which he was kept back from duly censuring, with none to support him outwardly, none but a few chosen ones to understand his inward thoughts, it is not wonderful if distant Rome seemed to him a blessed haven of rest from the troubles and sorrows of England. Let him flee thither at any cost, and have peace. Let him seek the counsel of the ghostly superior to whom he looked up in faith, and to whom he had been so faithful; to him he would open his soul; from him he would receive guidance, perhaps strength, in a course which was beset with so many difficulties on all sides. Ideal aspect of Rome. Rome, seen far away, looked pure and holy; its Pontiff seemed the one embodiment of right and law, the one shadow of God left upon earth, in a world of force and falsehood and foulness of life, a world where the civil sword was left in the hands of kings like William and Philip, and where an Emperor like Henry still wielded it in defiance of anathemas. At such a distance he would not see that the policy of Popes had already learned to be even more worldly and crooked than that of kings and emperors. He had not 577 learned, what Englishmen had already learned, that gold was as powerful in the counsels of the Holy See as ever it was in the closet of the Red King. The Pope’s agents and messengers might take bribes; the Pope himself, the holy College around him, would never sink to such shame. The majestic and attractive side of the Roman system was all that would present itself to his eyes. He would flee to the blessed shelter and be at peace. He had had enough of the world of kings and courts, the world where men of God were called on to send men to fight the battles of this life, and were called in question if swords were not sharp enough or if horses were not duly trained and caparisoned. Weary and sick at heart, he would turn away from such a scene and from its thankless duties; he would, for a while at least, leave the potsherds of the earth to strive with the potsherds of the earth; he would go where he might perhaps win leave to throw aside his burthen, or where, failing that, he might receive renewed strength to bear it.

New position taken by Anselm. In all this we can thoroughly enter into Anselm’s feelings, nor are we called upon to pronounce any censure upon either his feelings or his conduct. But it is plain that he was now taking up a wholly different position from that which he had taken at Rockingham, a position in which he could not expect to meet with, and in which he did not meet with, the same support which he had met with at Rockingham. At Gillingham and at Rockingham Anselm did nothing which could be fairly construed as a defiance of the law or an appeal to the Pope against any lawful authority of the King. All that he did was to ask the King’s leave to go for the pallium, that is to do what all his predecessors had done, to obey what might be as fairly called a custom of the realm as any other. Aspect of his conduct. In the discussions which now began, his conduct would, to say the least, have, in the eyes of 578 any but the most friendly judges, another look. He was asking leave to go to Rome, not to discharge an established duty, but, as it might be not unfairly argued, simply to gratify a caprice of his own. He might rightly ask for such leave; but it rested with the King’s discretion to grant or to refuse it, and no formal wrong would be done to him by refusing it. And to ask leave to go and consult the Pope, not because of any meddling with his spiritual office, not on account of any religious or ecclesiastical difficulty, but because the King had threatened him with a suit, just or unjust, in a purely temporal matter, had very much the air of appealing from the King’s authority to the Pope. We must remember throughout that Anselm nowhere makes the claim which Odo and William of Saint-Calais made before him, which Thomas of London made after him, to be exempt from temporal jurisdiction on the ground of his order. As such claims had no foundation in English law, neither was it at all in the spirit of Anselm to press them. All that he wanted was to be allowed to seek help in his troubles in the only quarter where he believed that help might be found. Causes of his loss of general support. But the petition for leave to seek it was put in a form and under circumstances which might well have awakened some distrust, some unwillingness, in minds far better disposed towards him than that of the Red King. We may not for a moment doubt the perfect singlemindedness of Anselm, his perfect righteousness from the point of view of his own conscience. But we cannot wonder that, in the new controversy, he failed to have the barons and people of England at his side, as he had had them on the day of trial at Rockingham and on the day of peace-making at Windsor.

The belief that the supposed season of peace might be a 579 season of reform had been shared by Anselm himself. Anselm’s continued demands of reform. He had more than once urged the King on the subject; but William had always answered that he was too busy dealing with his many enemies to think about such matters.[1567] Such an answer was a mere put-off; yet a more discouraging one might have been given. Anselm had therefore fully made up his mind to make the most of this special opportunity, and to make yet one more urgent appeal to the King to help him in his work.[1568] He determines not to answer the new summons.And now, at the meeting where he trusted to make this attempt, he was summoned to appear as defendant on a purely temporal charge. To that charge he determined to make no answer. But surely the reason which is given is rather the reason of Eadmer afterwards than of Anselm at the time. Working of the King’s court. Anselm is made to say that in the King’s court everything depended on the King’s nod, and that his cause would be examined in that court, without law, without equity, without reason.[1569] He had not found it so at Rockingham, 580 nor did he find it so now. But we can quite understand that, with his mind full of so much greater matters, he might think it better to let his judges settle matters as they might, for or against him, in questions as to horses and weapons and military training. The worst that could happen would be another payment of money.[1570] Anselm believed that the charge was a mere pretence, devised simply to hinder him from making the appeal to the King which he designed.[1571] He therefore made up his mind to make no answer to the summons, and to let the law, if there was any law in the matter, take its course.[1572] When he looked around at the spoliation of the Church, at the evils of all kinds which had crept in through lack of discipline, he feared the judgement of God on himself, if he did not make one last effort.[1573] His heart indeed sank when he saw that, of all the evil that was done, the King either was himself the doer or took pleasure in them that did it. He determines on a last effort. But he would strive once more; if his last effort failed, he would appeal to a higher spiritual power than his own; he would see what the authority and judgement of the Apostolic See could do.[1574]

581 Whitsun Gemót. May 24, 1097. The Whitsun festival came, and Anselm went to the Assembly. The place of meeting is not mentioned; according to usage it would be Westminster. Though the suit was hanging over Anselm, he went, not as a defendant in a suit, but as a chief member of the Gemót. He seems to have been graciously received by the King; Anselm favourably received; his last appeal. at least we hear of him at the royal table, and he had opportunities of private access to the royal ear. Of these chances he did not fail to take advantage for his purpose; but all was in vain; nothing at all tending to reform was to be got out of William Rufus.[1575] In this way the earlier days of meeting, the days of the actual festival, were spent. Then, as usual, the various matters of business which had to be dealt with by the King and his Witan were brought forward.[1576] Surmises as to the charge against Anselm. Among other questions men were eagerly asking what would become of the charge against the Archbishop as to the bad equipment of his knights in the late Welsh campaign. Would he have to pay some huge sum of money, or would he have to pray for mercy, and be thereby so humbled that he could never lift up his head again?[1577] Anselm’s thoughts meanwhile were set upon quite other matters. He had made his last attempt on the King’s conscience, and he had failed. There was nothing more to be done by his own unaided powers. He determines to ask leave to go to Rome. He must seek for the counsel and help of one greater than himself. He called together a body 582 of nobles of his own choice, those doubtless in whom he could put most trust, and he bade them carry a message from him to the King, to say that he was driven by the He declares his purpose to a chosen body. utmost need to ask his leave to go to Rome.[1578] We ask why he who had been on such intimate terms with the King during the earlier days of the meeting, was now forced to send a message instead of speaking to the King face to face. We may suppose that the arrangement was the same as at Rockingham, that there was an outer and an inner chamber, and that, while the suit against the Archbishop was pending, he was not allowed to take his natural place among the King’s counsellors. During the days of festival, he had been a guest and a friend; now that the days of business had come, he had changed into a defendant. We are not told what the lords of his choice said or thought of the message which he put into their hands. Aspect of the demand. Unless it was accompanied by a rather full explanation, it must have been startling. With the help of Eadmer we can follow the workings of Anselm’s mind; but to one who heard the request suddenly it must have had a strange sound. Did the Archbishop wish to complain to the Pope because the King was displeased with the trim and conduct of his military contingent? The King at least, when the message was taken to him, was utterly amazed. But William was not in one of his worst moods; he was sarcastic, but not wrathful. He refused the licence. The King’s answer. There could be no need for Anselm to go to the Pope. He would never believe that Anselm had committed any sin so black that none but the Pope could absolve him. And as for counsel, Anselm was much better fitted to give it to the Pope than the Pope was to give it to Anselm. Anselm took the refusal meekly. 583 “Power is in his hands; he says what pleases him. What he refuses now he may perhaps grant another day. I will multiply my prayers.”[1579] Anselm had therefore to stay in England. The charge against Anselm withdrawn. But the formal charge against him was withdrawn. Perhaps the King had merely made it in a fit of ill humour, and had long given up any serious thought of pressing it. And, if he really wished to annoy Anselm, he had now a way in which he might annoy him far more thoroughly and with much greater advantage than by any mere temporal suit.

Affairs of Wales. June-August, 1097. This year was a year of gatherings, alike for counsel and for warfare. The seeming submission of Wales was soon found to be utterly hollow. From Midsummer till August William was engaged in another British expedition, one which brought nothing but immediate toil and trouble, but of whose more distant results we shall have again to speak. Another assembly. On his return he summoned, perhaps not a general Gemót, but at any rate a council of prelates and lords, to discuss grave matters touching the state of the kingdom.[1580] We would fain hear something of their debates on other affairs than those of Anselm; but that privilege is denied us. Anselm’s request again refused. We only know that, when the council was about to break up, when all its members were eager to get to their homes, Anselm earnestly craved that his request to go to Rome might be granted, and that the King again refused.[1581]

William Rufus seems never to have been happy save when he was himself moving and keeping everybody else in motion. It must have been in his days as in the days 584 of Constantius, when the means of getting from place to place broke down through the multitude of bishops who were going to and fro for the endless councils.[1582] In the month of October the bishops and great lords at least, if no one else, were brought together for the fourth time this year. Assembly at Winchester. October 14, 1097. This time the place of meeting was Winchester; the day was the day of Saint Calixtus, the thirty-first anniversary of the great battle. We hear nothing of any other business, but only of the renewed petition of Anselm. It is clear that the idea of going to the Pope had seized on Anselm’s mind to an unhealthy degree. He could not help pressing it in season and out of season, clearly to the weakening both of his influence and of his position. Anselm renews his request. He made his request to the King both with his own lips—​this time he was no defendant—​and by the lips of others. The King was now thoroughly tired of the subject; he was now not sarcastic, but thoroughly annoyed and angry. He was weary of Anselm’s endlessly pressing a request which he must by this time know would not be granted. Anselm had wearied him too much; he now directly commanded that he should cease from his importunity, that he should submit to the judgement of the court and pay a fine for the annoyance which he had given to his sovereign.[1583] The King had an undoubted right to refuse the licence; but it is hard to see why the Archbishop was to be fined for asking for it. Anselm again impleaded. By this turn Anselm was again made a defendant. Anselm now offers to give good reasons, such as the King could not gainsay, for the course which he took. Alternative given to Anselm. The King refuses to hear any reasons, and, with a mixture of licence, threat, and defiance, he 585 gives the Archbishop a kind of alternative. Anselm must understand that, if he goes, the King will seize the archbishopric into his own hands, and will never again receive him as archbishop.[1584] There was some free expression of feeling in these assemblies; for this announcement of the King’s will was met by a storm of shouts on different sides, some cheering the King and some the Archbishop.[1585] The meeting adjourned. Some at last, the moderate party perhaps, proposed and carried an adjournment till the morrow, hoping meanwhile to settle matters in some other way.[1586]

Thursday, October 15, 1097. The next morning came; as so often before, Anselm and his friends sat waiting the royal pleasure. Some bishops and lords came out and asked Anselm what his purpose now was about the affair of yesterday. He had not, he answered, agreed to the adjournment Anselm and the bishops and lords. because he had any doubt as to his own purpose, but only lest he should seem to set no store by the opinion of others. He was in the same mind in which he had been yesterday; he would again crave the King’s leave to go. Go he must, for the sake of his own soul’s health, for the sake of the Christian religion, for the King’s own honour and profit, if he would only believe it.[1587] The bishops and lords asked if he had anything else to say; as for leave to go to Rome, it was no use talking; the King would not grant it. Anselm answers that, if the King will not grant it, he must follow the scripture and obey God rather than man. We here see that Anselm had brooded over his griefs till he had 586 reached the verge of fanaticism. Such language would have been exaggerated, had it been used when he was forbidden to go for the pallium according to ancient custom; it was utterly out of place when no clear duty of any kind, no law of eternal right, no positive law of the Church, bade him to go to Rome in defiance of the King’s orders.

Speech of Bishop Walkelin. At this stage we again meet a personal spokesman on the other side; Bishop Walkelin of Winchester speaks where doubtless William of Saint-Calais would have spoken, had he still lived. Walkelin’s argument was one hardly suited to the mind of Anselm. The King and his lords knew the Archbishop’s ways; they knew that he was a man not easily turned from his purpose; but it was not easy to believe that he would be firm in his purpose of casting aside the honour and wealth of the great office which he held, merely for the sake of going to Rome.[1588] Anselm’s face lighted up, and he fixed his keen eyes on Walkelin, with the words, “Truly I shall be firm.” This answer was taken to the King, and was debated for a long while in the inner council. Anselm and the bishops. At last Anselm bethinks him that his suffragans ought rather to be advising him than advising the King; he sends and bids them to come to him. Three of them come at the summons, Walkelin, the ritualist Osmund, the cunning leech John of Bath. They sat down on each side of their metropolitan. Anselm called on them, as bishops and prelates in the Church of God. If they were really willing to guard the right and the justice of God as they were ready to guard the laws and usages of a mortal man,[1589] they will let him tell them in full his 587 reason for the course which he is taking, and they will then give him their counsel in God’s name.[1590] The three bishops chose first to confer with their brethren; Walkelin and Robert were then sent in to the King, and the whole body of bishops came once more to Anselm. The bishops’ portrait of themselves. We now see the portrait of the prelates of the Red King’s day, as it is drawn by their own spokesman. Anselm they knew to be a devout and holy man who had his conversation in heaven. But they were hindered by the kinsfolk whom they sustained, by the manifold affairs of the world which they loved; they could not rise to the loftiness of Anselm’s life or trample on this world as he did.[1591] But if he would come down to them, and would walk in their way,[1592] then they would consult for him as they would consult for themselves, and would help him in his affairs as if they were their own. If he would persist in standing alone and referring everything to God,[1593] they would not go beyond the fealty which they owed to the King. This was plain speaking enough; the doctrine of interest against right has seldom, even in these later times, been more openly set forth. One would think that the bishops simply meant to strengthen Anselm’s fixed purpose; they could not hope to move him with arguments which certainly did not do justice to their own case. Anselm’s answer. Anselm’s scholastic training always enabled him to seize an advantage in argument. “You have spoken well,” he answered; “go to your lord; I 588 will cleave to God.”[1594] They did as he bade them; they went, and Anselm was left almost alone; the few friends who clave to him sat apart at his bidding, and prayed to God to bring the matter to a good ending.[1595]

In all these debates it is the bishops who play the worst part. They seem to say in calm earnest the same kind of things which the King said in wrath or in jest. Part of the lay lords. After a short delay, they come back, accompanied by some lay barons, and the tone of their discourse is at once raised. Anselm has no longer the laity on his side, as he had at Rockingham; nor can we wonder at the change. The speech which is now made is harsh, perhaps captious; but at all events the stand is now taken on direct legal grounds, no longer on the base motives confessed to by the bishops. The King sent word that Anselm had troubled him, embittered him, tortured him, by his complaints.[1596] Anselm’s promise to obey the customs. The Archbishop is reminded that, after the suit at Rockingham and the reconciliation which followed at Windsor—​a reconciliation which is now attributed to the earnest prayers of Anselm’s friends[1597]—​he had sworn to obey the laws and customs of the realm, and to defend them against all men.[1598] After this promise the King had believed that Anselm would give him no more trouble.[1599] 589 But he had already broken his oath—​the charge is delicately worded—​when He is charged with breach of promise. he threatened to go to Rome without the King’s leave.[1600] For any of the great men of the realm so to do was utterly unheard of; for him most of all. Anselm’s enemies had now the advantage of him; he certainly had uttered words which might be not unfairly construed as an intended breach of the law. They therefore called on him to make oath that he would never appeal to the Holy See in any shape in any matter which the King might lay upon him; Alternative given to him. otherwise he must leave the kingdom with all speed, on what conditions he already knew. And if he chose to stay and take the oath, he must submit to be fined at the judgement of the court for having troubled the King so much about a matter in which he had after all not stuck firm to his own purpose.[1601] This last condition seems hard measure; there was surely no treason in making a request to the King which it rested with the King to grant or to refuse. With regard to the alleged breach of promise they undoubtedly stood on firmer ground.

The King’s messengers did not wait for an answer. Anselm therefore rose; followed by his companions, he went in to the King, and, according to custom, sat down beside him.[1602] He asked whether the message which he had just heard had really come from the King, and he received for answer that it had. Anselm and the King. Anselm then said that he had undoubtedly made the promise to observe the laws, but that he made it only in God’s name, and so far as the laws were according to right, and could be obeyed in 590 God’s name.[1603] Qualifications and distinctions. The King and his lords answered that in the promise there had been no mention of God or of right.[1604] We should be well pleased to have the actual words of the promise; but we need not suppose any direct misstatement of fact on either side; the forms of oaths and promises are commonly capable of more than one interpretation. Words which one side looks on as surplusage another side looks on as the root of the whole matter. But the form of the answer gave Anselm, if not a logical, at least a rhetorical, advantage. If there was no mention of God or right, what was there mention of? No Christian man could be bound to observe laws which were contrary to God and right. We have here reached the beginning of those distinctions and qualifications which play so great a part in the debates of the next century; but with Anselm the appeal is simply to God and right; there is not a word about the privileges of his order. His hearers murmured and wagged their heads, but said nothing openly.[1605] Anselm’s discourse; duty to God always excepted. So the Primate went on to lay down at some length the doctrine that every promise of earthly duty involved in its own nature a saving of duty to God. Faith was pledged in earthly matters according to the faith due to God; faith to God was therefore excepted by the very terms of the promise.[1606] The argument is doubtless sound, as regards the individual conscience; it leaves out of sight, and any argument of that age would probably have left out of sight, 591 the truth that men may differ as to what is duty towards God, and that no lawgiver or administrator of the law can possibly listen to every scruple which may be urged on such grounds in favour of disobedience. To Anselm’s mind the case was clear. A custom which hindered him from going to consult the Vicar of Saint Peter for his own soul’s health and for the good of the Church was a custom contrary to God and right, a custom which ought to be cast aside and disobeyed. No man who feared God would hinder him from going to the head of Christendom on God’s service. He ended with a parable. The King would not think himself well served if any powerful vassal of his should by terrors and threatenings hinder any other of his subjects from doing his duty and service to him.

Answer of Count Robert. It was perhaps not wholly in enmity that the Count of Meulan, who at Rockingham had frankly professed his admiration of Anselm, joined the King at this stage in trying to turn off the matter with a jest. The Primate, he said, was preaching them a sermon; but prudent people could not admit his line of argument.[1607] And certainly Anselm’s present line of argument, the assertion of individual conscience against established law, could not be admitted by any legislative or judicial assembly. The barons against Anselm. A disturbance followed; the barons who had stood by the Archbishop when he lay under a manifestly unjust charge joined in the clamour against him when he declared that the law of the land was something to be despised and disobeyed. But Anselm’s conscience was not disturbed; he sat quiet and silent, with his face towards the ground, till the clamour wore itself out.[1608] He then finished his sermon, as Count 592 Robert called it. He ends his discourse. No Christian man ought to demand of him that he would never appeal to the blessed Peter or his Vicar. So to swear would be to abjure Peter, and to abjure Peter would be to abjure Christ who had set Peter as the chief over his Church. He then turned to the King with a kind of gentle defiance; “When I deny Christ, O King, for your sake, then will I not be slow to pay a fine at the judgement of your court for my sin in asking your leave.” Half in anger, half in mockery, Count Robert said, “You will present yourself to Peter and the Pope; but no Pope shall get the better of us, to our knowledge.”[1609] “God knows,” answered Anselm, “what may be in store for you; He will be able, if He thinks good, to guide me to the threshold of his apostles.” With these words the Archbishop rose, and went again into the outer chamber.

The King and his counsellors seem to have been moved by the calm resolution of Anselm, even when the letter of the law was on their own side. Either Rufus was not in his most savage mood, or his wily Achitophel contrived to keep him in some restraint. Nothing could be gained by keeping Anselm in the kingdom. He had already had the choice set before him. Anselm to be allowed to go, but the archbishopric to be seized if he went. He might go; but, if he went, the archbishopric would be seized into the King’s hands. He had made his choice, and he should be allowed to carry it out without hindrance; only he knew on what conditions. The decision was on the whole not altogether unfair; but the inherent pettiness of the magnanimous King could not help throwing in an insult or two by the way. If Anselm chose to go, all that he had, in Rufus’ version of the law, at once passed to the King.593 Anselm allowed to go, but the archbishopric to be seized. He was therefore told, in the message which was sent out to him, that he might go, but that he might take nothing with him which belonged to the King.[1610] Anselm did not, like William of Saint-Calais, bargain for the means of crossing in state with dogs, hawks, and servants.[1611] He seems tacitly to raise a point of law. The lands of the archbishopric might pass to the King; but that could not take from him his mere personal goods. “I have,” he said, “horses, clothes, furniture, which perhaps somebody may say are the King’s. But I will go naked and on foot, rather than give up my purpose.” When these words were reported to Rufus, for a moment he felt a slight sense of shame.[1612] He did not wish the Archbishop to go naked and barefoot. But within eleven days he must be ready at the haven to cross the sea, and a messenger from the King would be there to tell him what he and his companions would be allowed to take with them. The King’s bidding was announced to the Archbishop, and Anselm’s companions wished, now the matter seemed to be settled, to go at once to their own quarters. But Anselm would not leave the man who was his earthly lord, who had once been, in form at least, his friend, to whom he held himself to stand in so close an official and personal relation, without one word face to face. Anselm’s last interview with the King. He entered the presence-chamber, and once more the saint sat down side by side with the foulest of sinners. “My lord,” said Anselm, “I am going. If I could have gone with your good will, it would have better become you, and it would have been more pleasing to every good man. But since things are 594 turned another way, though it grieves me as regards you, as regards myself I will, according to my power, bear it with a calm mind. And not even for this will I, by the Lord’s help, withdraw myself from the love of your soul’s health. Now therefore, not knowing when I may again see you, I commend you to God, and, as a ghostly father speaking to a beloved son, as an Archbishop of Canterbury speaking to a King of England, I would, before I go, give you my blessing, if you do not refuse it.” For a moment Rufus was touched; his good angel perhaps spoke to him then for the last time. He blesses Rufus. “I refuse not your blessing,” was his answer. The man of God arose; the King bowed his head, and Anselm made the sign of the cross over it. He then went forth, leaving the King and all that were with him wondering at the ready cheerfulness with which he spoke and went.[1613]

Anselm at Canterbury. Rufus and Anselm never met again. From Winchester the Archbishop went to his own home at Canterbury.[1614] The day after he came there, he gathered together his monks, and addressed them in a farewell discourse.[1615] He takes the pilgrim’s staff. Then, in the sight of a crowd of monks, clerks, and lay folk, he took the staff and scrip of a pilgrim before the altar. He commended all present to Christ, and set forth amidst their tears and wailings. The same day he and his comrades reached Dover. There he found that the passing current of better feeling which had touched the King’s heart as he bowed his head for Anselm’s blessing had been but for a moment. Rufus had gone back to 595 his old mind, to the spirit of petty insult and petty gain. William of Warelwast at Dover. The King’s obedient clerk, William of Warelwast, one day to be the builder of the twin towers of Exeter, was there already. For fifteen days Anselm and his companions were kept at Dover, waiting for a favourable wind. Meanwhile William of Warelwast went in and out with Anselm; he ate at his table, and said not a word of the purpose which had brought him.[1616] On the fifteenth day the wind changed, and the sailors urged the Archbishop’s party to cross at once. When they were on the shore ready to start, William stopped the Archbishop as if he had been a runaway slave or a criminal escaping from justice,[1617] and in the King’s name forbade him to cross, till he had declared everything that he had in his baggage. In hope of finding money, all Anselm’s bags and trunks were opened and ransacked, in the sight of a vast crowd that stood by wondering at so unheard of a deed, and cursing those who did it.[1618] The bags were opened and ransacked in vain. Nothing was found that the King’s faithful clerk thought worth his master’s taking. Anselm crosses to Whitsand. The Archbishop, with Baldwin and Eadmer, was then allowed to set sail, and they landed safely at Whitsand.

The archbishopric seized by the King. As soon as the King heard that Anselm was out of the kingdom, he did as he had said that he would do; he again seized all the estates of the archbishopric into his own hands. This was only what was to be looked for; it was fully in accordance with the doctrines of Flambard, and better kings than William Rufus would 596 have done the like in the like case. But Rufus or his agents went much further. Our guide implies that he acted as if Anselm had been an intruder in the archbishopric. Anselm’s acts declared null. All the acts and orders of Anselm during his four years’ primacy—​that is, we must suppose, all leases, grants, and legal transactions of every kind—​were declared null and void.[1619] Much loss and wrong must have been thus caused to many persons. A man who had, in the old phrase, bought land of the archbishopric for a term or for lives[1620] would lose his land, and, we may be sure, would not get back his money. A clerk collated by the Archbishop might be turned out of his living to make room for a nominee of the King. It is no wonder then that the wrongs which were done now were said to be greater than the wrongs which had been done when the archiepiscopal estates had before been seized after the death of Lanfranc.[1621] For at any rate the acts of Lanfranc were not reversed. One feels a certain desire to know what became of the Archbishop’s knights whose array had so displeased the King earlier in the year. But we hear nothing of them or of any particular class; all is quite general. In one case indeed it is quite certain that the rule that all Anselm’s acts should be treated as invalid was not carried out. The monks keep Peckham. The monks of Christ Church clearly kept their temporary possession of the manor of Peckham. For they spent the whole income of it on great architectural works which Anselm himself had begun. The metropolitan church, so lately rebuilt by Lanfranc, had already become small in the eyes of a younger generation, as indeed it was smaller than many 597 minsters of the same date. The church of Lanfranc had followed the usual Norman plan; the short eastern limb, the monks’ choir, was under the tower.[1622] Rebuilding of the choir of Christ Church. The arrangements of the minster were now recast after a new pattern which did not commonly prevail till many years later. The eastern limb was rebuilt on a far greater scale, itself forming as it were a cruciform church, with its own transepts, its own towers, one of which in after days received the name of Anselm. Ernulf Prior 1096? Abbot of Peterborough, 1107; Bishop of Rochester, 1115. This work, begun by Anselm before his banishment, was carried on in his absence by the prior of his appointment, Ernulf—​Earnwulf—​a monk of his old house of Bec, but perhaps of English birth, who rose afterwards to be Abbot of Peterborough and Bishop of Rochester.[1623] In marked contrast to the speed with which Lanfranc had carried through his work, the choir begun by Ernulf and carried on by his successor Prior Conrad was not consecrated till late in the days of Henry.[1624]

Comparison of the trials of William of Saint-Calais, Anselm, and Thomas. After reading the accounts of these two great debates or trials, at Rockingham and at Winchester, it is impossible to avoid looking both backwards and forwards. The story of these proceedings must be told, as I have throughout tried to tell it, with an eye to the earlier proceedings against William of Saint-Calais, to the later proceedings against Thomas of London. The three stories 598 supply an instructive contrast. In each case a bishop is arraigned before a civil tribunal; in each case the bishop appeals to the Pope; but beyond that the three men have little in common. Comparison of the men. William and Thomas were both of them, though in widely different senses, playing a part; it is Anselm alone who is throughout perfectly simple and unconscious. Through the whole of Anselm’s life, we feel that he never could have acted otherwise than as he did act. He never stopped to think what was the right thing for a saintly archbishop to do; he simply did at all times what his conscience told him that he ought to do. Position of Thomas; Thomas, perfectly sincere, thoroughly bent on doing his duty, was still following a conscious ideal of duty; he was always thinking what a saintly archbishop ought to do; above all things, we may be sure, he was thinking what Anselm, in the like case, would have done. Thus, while Anselm acts quite singly, Thomas is, consciously though sincerely, playing a part. of William of Saint-Calais. William of Saint-Calais is playing a part in a far baser sense; he appeals to the Pope, he appeals to ecclesiastical privileges in general, simply to serve his own personal ends. He appealed to those privileges more loudly than anybody else, when he thought that by that appeal he might himself escape condemnation. He trampled them under foot more scornfully than anybody else, when he thought that by so doing he might bring about the condemnation of Anselm and his own promotion. But it is curious to see how in some points the sincere acting of Thomas and the insincere acting of William agree as distinguished from the pure single-mindedness of Anselm. Both William and Thomas distinctly appeal to the Pope from the sentence of the highest court in their own land. Anselm does not strictly appeal to the Pope. We cannot say that Anselm did this; he does not refuse the sentence of the King’s court; he does not ask the Pope to set aside the sentence of the King’s court; the utmost that he does is 599 to say that it is his duty to obey God rather than man, and that his duty to God obliges him to go to the Pope. To the Pope therefore he will go, even though the King forbids him; but he is ready at the same time to bear patiently the spoiling of his goods as the penalty of going. This is assuredly not an appeal to the Pope in the same sense as the appeals made by William and Thomas.

Among the marks of difference in the cases is that both William and Thomas strongly assert the privileges of their order; none but the Pope may judge a bishop. Anselm does not assert clerical privileges. Anselm never once, during his whole dispute with William Rufus, makes the slightest claim to any such privilege; he never breathes a word about the rights of the clerical order. The doctrine that none but the Pope may judge the Archbishop of Canterbury—​nothing is said about other priests or other bishops—​is heard of only once during the whole story.[1625] And then it is not put forth by Anselm; it is not openly put forth by anybody; it is merely mentioned by Eadmer as something which came into the minds of the undutiful bishops as a kind of after-thought. This most likely means that it was not really thought of at the time, either by the bishops or by anybody else, but that Eadmer, writing by fresh lights learned at Rome and at Bari, could no longer understand a state of things in which it was not thought of by somebody. The truth doubtless is that in Anselm’s day the doctrine of clerical exemption from temporal jurisdiction was a novelty which was creeping in. It was well known enough for Odo and William of Saint-Calais to catch at it to serve their own ends; it was not so fully established that it was at all a matter of conscience with Anselm to assert it. By the time of Thomas every doctrine of the kind had so grown that its assertion had become a point of conscience 600 with every strict churchman. Question of observing the customs. But there is another point in which the case of Anselm and the case of Thomas agree as distinguished from the case of William of Saint-Calais. In this last case nothing turned on any promise of the Bishop to obey the customs of the realm. Much in the case of Anselm, much more in the case of Thomas, turned on such a promise. In each case the Archbishop pleads a certain reservation expressed or understood; but there is a wide difference between the reservation made by Anselm and the reservation made by Thomas. The favourite formula with Thomas, the formula which he proposes, the formula which he is at Clarendon with difficulty persuaded to withdraw and on which he again falls back,[1626] is “saving my order.” Anselm has nothing to say about his order; he is not fighting for the privileges of any special body of men; he is simply a righteous man clothed with a certain office, the duties of which office he must discharge. It is not his order that he reserves; he reserves only the higher and more abiding names of God and right.

Nature of our reports of the trials. As for the cases themselves and the tribunals before which they were heard, we must always remember that our reports, though very full, are not official. Their authors therefore use technical or non-technical language at pleasure. They assume familiarity with the nature of the court and its mode of procedure; they do not stop to explain many things which we should be very glad if they had stopped to explain. But it is clear that the nature of the proceedings was not exactly the same in the three cases. Comparison of the proceedings in each case. And it is singular that, in point of mere procedure, there seems more likeness between the case of Anselm and the case of Thomas than there is between either and the case of William of Saint-Calais. William 601 William and Thomas summoned to answer a charge. of Saint-Calais and Thomas were both of them, in the strictest sense, summoned before a court to answer a charge. The charges were indeed of quite different kinds in the two cases. William of Saint-Calais was charged with high treason. Thomas, besides a number of demands about money, was charged only with failing to appear in the King’s court in answer to an earlier summons. Anselm seeks advice on a point of law. Anselm, on the other hand, cannot be said to have been really charged with anything, though the King and his party tried to treat him as though he had been. The assembly at Rockingham was gathered at Anselm’s own request, to inform him on a point of law. The King and his bishops tried to treat Anselm as a criminal; but they found that the general feeling of the assembly would not allow them to do so. At Winchester again, Anselm was not summoned to answer any charge, for the charge about the troops in the Welsh war had been dropped at Windsor. The charges, such as they are, which are brought against him turn up as it were casually in the course of the proceedings. Yet the order of things seems much the same in the case of Anselm and in the case of Thomas, while in the case of William of Saint-Calais it seems to be different. Proceedings in the case of William of Saint-Calais. In the case of William of Saint-Calais everything is done in the King’s presence. The Bishop himself has more than once to leave the place of meeting, while particular points are discussed; but there is not that endless going to and fro which there is in the other two cases. In the case of Thomas, as in the case of Anselm, we see plainly the inner room where the King sits with his immediate counsellors, while the Archbishop waits in an outer place with the general body of the assembly. Architectural arrangements. At Northampton we see the architectural arrangement more clearly than either at Rockingham or at Winchester. Thomas enters the great hall, and goes no further, while the 602 King’s inner council is held in the solar.[1627] Constitution of the several assemblies. It is possible, as indeed I have already hinted,[1628] that there was a difference in the nature of the assembly in the case of William of Saint-Calais and in the two cases of Anselm and Thomas. We must remember that in the reign of William Rufus the judicial and administrative system was still only forming itself, and that many things were then vague and irregular, both in fact and in name, which had taken a definite shape in the time of Henry the Second. Between the case of Anselm and the case of Thomas came the justiciarship of Roger of Salisbury and the chancellorship of Thomas himself. The Witenagemót; I am inclined to think that, at Rockingham, at Winchester, at Northampton, the assembly was strictly the great assembly of the nation, the ancient Witenagemót, with such changes in its working as had taken place between the days of the Confessor and the days of William Rufus, and again between the days of William Rufus and the days of Henry the Second. its constitution becomes gradually less popular. Each of these periods of change would of course do something towards taking away from the old popular character of the assembly. At Rockingham that popular character is by no means lost. We are not told where the line, if any, was drawn; but a multitude of monks, clerks, and laymen were there.[1629] At Northampton we hear of no class below the lesser barons; and they, with the sheriffs, wait in the outer hall, till they are specially summoned 603 to the King’s presence. Lessened freedom of speech. At Rockingham too and at Winchester there seems much greater freedom of speech than there is at Northampton. The whole assembly shouts and cheers as it pleases, and a simple knight steps forth to speak and to speak boldly.[1630] At Northampton, as at Rockingham and at Winchester, the Archbishop is allowed the company of his personal followers. William Fitz-Stephen and Herbert of Bosham sit at the feet of Thomas, as Eadmer and Baldwin sit at the feet of Anselm. But at Northampton the disciples are roughly checked in speaking to their master, in a way of which there is no sign in the earlier assemblies. At Rockingham and Winchester again, though the Archbishop stays for the most part outside in the hall, yet he more than once goes unbidden into the presence-chamber, and is even followed thither by his faithful monks. At Northampton Thomas is never admitted to the King’s presence, and no one seems to go into the inner room who is not specially summoned. This may be merely because, as is likely enough, strictness of rule, form, and etiquette had greatly advanced between William Rufus and Henry the Second. Or it may have been because Thomas was strictly summoned to answer a charge, while Anselm was really under no charge at all, but came as a member of the assembly.

The inner and outer council; Another point here arises. I cannot but think that in these great assemblies, consisting of an inner and an outer body, we must see the same kind of distinction which we saw on the great day of Salisbury between the Witan and the landsitting men. foreshadowing of lords and commons. That is, I see in the inner and outer bodies the foreshadowing of Lords and Commons. To this day there is one chamber in which the King’s throne is set; there is another chamber whose occupants do not enter the presence of that throne, except by 604 special summons. I am inclined therefore to see, both in the case of Anselm and in the case of Thomas, a true gathering of the Witan of the realm. Thomas tried before the Witan; Thomas comes, like Strafford or Hastings, to answer a charge before the Court of our Lord the King in Parliament,[1631] that court, which from an assembly of the whole nation, gradually shrank up into an assembly of the present peerage. In the case of Anselm I see the same body acting, not strictly as a court, but rather as the great inquest of the nation, but at the same time fluctuating somewhat, as was but natural in that age, between its judicial and its legislative functions. William before the Thening-mannagemót. But in the tribunal which sat on William of Saint-Calais I am, as I have already said, inclined to see, not the Mickle Gemót of the whole nation, but rather the King’s court in a narrower sense, the representative of the ancient Theningmannagemót, the more strictly official body.[1632] Here we have no division of chambers; the proceedings are strictly those of a court trying a charge, and the King, as chief judge, is present throughout.

605 Estimate of the three cases. As for the matter of the three cases, the trial of William of Saint-Calais was in itself the perfectly fair trial of a rebel who, in the end, after the custom of the age, came off very lightly for his rebellion. Behaviour of Rufus; There really seems nothing to blame William Rufus for in that matter—​William Rufus, that is, still largely guided by Lanfranc—​except some characteristic pettinesses just towards the end of the story.[1633] Towards Anselm William appears—​save under one or two momentary touches of better feeling—​simply as the power of evil striving, by whatever means, to crush the power of good. He seems none the less so, even when on particular points his own case is technically right. of Henry the Second. Henry the Second, acting honestly for the good of his kingdom, both technically and morally right in his main quarrel, stoops to the base and foolish course of trying to crush his adversary by a crowd of charges in which the King seems to have been both morally and technically wrong, and which certainly would never have been brought if the Archbishop had not given offence on other grounds. William Rufus again, and Henry the Second also, each forsook his own position by calling in, when it suited their momentary purposes, the very power which their main position bade them to control and to keep out of their kingdom. Comparison with Henry the First. Not so the great king who came between them. The Lion of Justice knew, and he alone in those days seems to have known, how to carry on a controversy of principle, without ever forsaking his own position, without ever losing his temper or lowering his dignity, without any breach of personal respect and friendship towards the holy man whom his kingly office made it his duty to withstand.

The three years of Anselm’s first sojourn beyond sea 606 concern us for the most part only indirectly. Effect on Anselm of his foreign sojourn. Of their most important aspect, as concerns us, I have spoken elsewhere,[1634] and we shall again see their fruit before the present work is ended. In his journeyings to Lyons, to Rome, to Bari, Anselm learned a new doctrine which he had never found out either at Bec or at Canterbury. It was not for his good that he, who had, like the Primates who had gone before him, received his staff from the King’s hands, and placed his own hands in homage between them, should hear the anathema pronounced against the prince who should bestow or the clerk who should receive any ecclesiastical benefice in such sort as no prince had scrupled to give them, as no clerk had scrupled to receive them, in the days of King Eadward and in the days of King William.[1635] When Anselm came back to England, he came, as we shall see, the same Anselm as of old in every personal quality, in every personal virtue. Change in him. But in all things which touched the relations of popes, kings, and bishops, he came back another man.

His journey. But in the course of Anselm’s adventures, in his foreign journeys, there are details here and there which no Englishman can read without interest. We come across constant signs of the place which England and her Primate held in the minds of men of other lands. Alleged scheme of Odo Duke of Burgundy [1078–1102] against Anselm. We read how no less a prince than Odo Duke of Burgundy, already a crusader in Spain and afterwards a crusader in Palestine, was tempted by the report of the wealth of the great English see to sink into a common robber, and to set forth for the purpose of plundering the Primate as he passed through his land. We read how he was turned from his purpose, when he saw the white hair, the gentle and venerable look, of the Archbishop, 607 the look which won all hearts. Instead of harming him, Odo received his kiss and sought his blessing, and sent him under a safe guard to the borders of his duchy.[1636] We read how the likeness of that venerable face had been painted by cunning limners in the interest of Clement, that the robbers who were sent to seize the faithful follower of Urban might better know their intended victim. Anselm at Rome. We read with some national pride how, at his first interview with Urban, when Anselm bowed himself at the Pontiff’s feet, he was raised, received to his kiss, and seated by him as one of equal rank, the Pope and Patriarch of another world. Council of Lateran. We read how, in the great gathering in the head church of the city and of the world, when no man knew what was the fitting place in a Roman council for a guest such as none had ever seen before, the English Archbishop was placed at the papal bidding in a seat of special honour. Anselm took his seat in that apse which was spared when papal barbarism defaced the long arcades of Constantine, when the patriarchal throne of the world was cast forth as an useless thing,[1637] but which the more relentless havoc of our own day, eager, it would seem, to get rid of all that is older than the dogmas of modern Rome, has ruthlessly swept away. We read how visitors and pilgrims from England bowed to kiss the feet of Anselm, as they would have kissed those of Urban himself, and how the humble saint ever refused 608 such unbecoming worship.[1638] And we are most touched of all to hear how, among all these honours, Anselm was commonly spoken of in Rome, not by his name, not by the titles of his office, but simply as “the holy man.”[1639] At Rome, that name might have a special meaning. It was well deserved by the one suitor at the Roman throne who abstained from the use of Rome’s most convincing argument.

But in the record of Anselm’s wanderings there is one tale which comes home more than any other to the hearts of Englishmen, a tale which carries us back, if not strictly to the days of English freedom, at least to the days when we had a conqueror whom we had made our own. Council of Bari. The fathers are gathered at Bari, in the great minster of the Lykian Nicolas, where the arts of northern and southern Christendom, the massiveness of the Norman, the finer grace of the Greek, are so strangely blended in the pile which was then fresh from the craftsman’s hand. There, in his humility, the pilgrim from Canterbury takes to himself a modest place amongst the other bishops, with the faithful Eadmer sitting at his feet.[1640] The Pope calls on his father and master, Anselm Archbishop of the English, to arise and speak. There, in the city so lately torn away from Eastern Christendom, Anselm is bidden to justify the change which Latin theology had made in that 609 creed of the East which changeth not. The Pope harangues on the sufferings of the Church in various lands, and, above all, on the evil deeds of the tyrant of England. The assembled fathers agree with one voice that the sword of Peter must be drawn, and that such a sinner must be smitten in the face of the whole world. Anselm pleads for Rufus. Then Anselm kneels at the feet of Urban, and craves that no such blow may be dealt on the man who had so deeply wronged him.[1641] But, while these high debates were going on, the curious eye of Eadmer had lighted on an object which spoke straight to his heart as an Englishman and a monk of Christ Church. The cope of Beneventum. Among the assembled prelates the Archbishop of Beneventum appeared clad in a cope of surpassing richness. Eadmer knew at once whence it came; he knew that it had once been one of the glories of Canterbury, worn by Primates of England before England had bowed either to the Norman or to the Dane. Eadmer, brought up from his childhood in the cloister of Christ Church, had been taught as a boy by aged monks who could remember the days of Cnut and Emma. Dealings between Canterbury and Beneventum. Those elders of the house, Eadwig and Blæcman and Farman, had told him how in those days there had been a mighty famine in the land of Apulia, how the then Archbishop of Beneventum had travelled through foreign lands to seek help for his starving flock, how he brought with him a precious relic, the arm of the apostle Bartholomew, and how, having passed through Italy and Gaul, he was led to cross the sea by the fame of the wealth of 610 England and of the piety and bounty of Emma its Lady. She gave him plenteous gifts for his people, and he asked whether she would not give yet more as the price of the precious relic. Emma buys the arm of Saint Bartholomew. The genuineness of the treasure was solemnly sworn to;[1642] a great price was paid for it by the Lady, and, by the special order of King Cnut, it was added as a precious gift to the treasures of the metropolitan church. For in those days, says Eadmer, it was the manner of the English to set the patronage of the saints before all the wealth of this world. Æthelnoth’s gift of the cope. The Archbishop of Beneventum went back, loaded with the alms of England, and bearing with him, among other gifts from his brother Primate Æthelnoth, this very cope richly embroidered with gold with all the skill of English hands. Eadmer, taught by the tradition of his elders, knew the vestment as he saw it in that far land on the shoulders of the successor of the prelate who had come to our island for help in his day of need. Eadmer recognises the cope. He saw it with joy; he pointed it out to Father Anselm, and, feigning ignorance, he asked the Beneventan Archbishop the history of the splendid cope which he wore. He was pleased to find that the tradition of Beneventum was the same as the tradition of Canterbury.[1643] Now that we have made our way into other times and other lands, it is pleasing to look back for a moment, with our faithful Eadmer, to days when England still was England, even though she had already learned to bow to a foreign King and a foreign Lady.