had been ten years on the throne there were only three English
bishops left. At his death there was only one—the saintly
Wulfstan of Worcester. The same process was carried out with
regard to abbacies, and indeed with all important places of
ecclesiastical preferment. By 1080 the English Church was
officered entirely by aliens. Just as with the lay landholders,
the change of personnel made a vast difference, not so much in
the legal position of the new-comers as in the way in which they
regarded their office. The outlook of a Norman bishop was as
unlike that of his English predecessor as that of a Norman baron.
The English Church had got out of touch with the ideals and the
spiritual movements of the other Western churches. In especial
the great monastic revival which had started from the abbey
of Cluny and spread all over France, Italy and Germany had
hardly touched this island. The continental churchmen of the
11th century were brimming over with ascetic zeal and militant
energy, while the majority of the English hierarchy were slack
and easy-going. The typical faults of the dark ages, pluralism,
simony, lax observation of the clerical rules, contented ignorance,
worldliness in every aspect, were all too prevalent in England.
There can be no doubt that the greater part of William’s nominees
were better men than those who preceded them; his great archbishop,
Lanfranc, though a busy statesman, was also an energetic
reformer and a man of holy life. Osmund, Remigius and others
of the first post-Conquest bishops have left a good name behind
them. The condition of the church alike in the matter of
spiritual zeal, of hard work and of learning was much improved.
But there was a danger behind this revival; for the reformers
of the 11th century, in their zeal for establishing the Kingdom
of God on earth, were not content with raising the moral and
intellectual standards prevailing in Christendom, but sought
to bring the whole scheme of life under the church, by asserting
the absolute supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power,
wherever the two came in contact or overlapped. The result,
since the feudal and ecclesiastical systems had become closely
interwoven, and the frontier between the religious and secular
spheres must ever be vague and undefined, was the conflict
between the spiritual and temporal powers which, for two
centuries to come, was to tear Europe into warring factions
(see the articles Church History; Papacy; Investiture).
The Norman Conquest of England was contemporaneous with
the supreme influence of the greatest exponent of the theory of
ecclesiastical supremacy, the archdeacon Hildebrand, who in
1073 mounted the papal throne as Gregory VII. (q.v.). William,
despite all his personal faults, was a sincerely pious man, but it
could not be expected that he would acquiesce in these new
developments of the religious reformation which he had done
his best to forward. Hence we find a divided purpose in the
policy which he pursued with regard to church affairs. He
endeavoured to keep on the best terms with the papacy: he
welcomed legates and frequently consulted the pope on purely
spiritual matters. He even took the hazardous step of separating
ecclesiastical courts and lay courts, giving the church leave to
establish separate tribunals of her own, a right which she had
never possessed in Saxon England. The spiritual jurisdiction
of the bishop had hitherto been exercised in the ordinary national
courts, with lay assessors frequently taking part in the proceedings,
and mixing their dooms with the clergy’s canonical
decisions. William in 1076 granted the church a completely
independent set of courts, a step which his successors were to
regret for many a generation.
At the same time, however, he was not blind to the possibilities of papal interference in domestic matters, and of the danger of conflict between the crown and the recently-strengthened clerical order. To guard against them he laid down three general rules: (1) that no one should be recognized as pope in England till he had himself taken cognizance of the papal election, and that no papal letters should be brought into the realm without his leave; (2) that no decisions of the English ecclesiastical synods should be held valid till he had examined and sanctioned them; (3) that none of his barons or ministers should be excommunicated unless he approved of such punishment being inflicted on them. These rules seem to argue a deeply rooted distrust of the possible encroachments of the papacy on the power of the state. The question of ecclesiastic patronage, which was to be the source of the first great quarrel between the crown and the church in the next generation, is not touched upon. William retained in his own hands the choice of bishops and abbots, and Alexander II. and Gregory VII. seem to have made no objection to his doing so, in spite of the claim that free election was the only canonical way of filling vacancies. The Conqueror was allowed for his lifetime to do as he pleased, since he was recognized as a true friend of the church. But the question was only deferred and not settled.
The political history of William’s later years is unimportant; his main energy was absorbed in the task of holding down and organizing his new kingdom. His rather precarious conquest of the county of Maine, his long quarrels with Philip I. of France, who suborned against him his William’s later reign. undutiful and rebellious eldest son Robert, his negotiation with Flanders and Germany, deserve no more than a mention. It is more necessary to point out that he reasserted on at least one occasion (when King Malcolm Canmore did him homage) the old suzerainty of the English kings over Scotland. He also began that encroachment on the borders of Wales which was to continue with small interruptions for the next two centuries. The advance was begun by his great vassals, the earls of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, all of whom occupied new districts on the edge of the mountains of Powys and Gwynedd. William himself led an expedition as far as St Davids in 1081, and founded Cardiff Castle to mark the boundary of his realm north of the Bristol Channel.
Perhaps the most noteworthy event of the second portion of the Conqueror’s reign was a rebellion which, though it made no head and was easily suppressed, marks the commencement of that feudal danger which was to be the constant trouble of the English kings for the next three generations. Two of the greatest of his foreign magnates, Roger, earl of Hereford, and Ralph, earl of Norfolk, rose against him in 1075, with no better cause than personal grievances and ambitions. He put them down with ease; the one was imprisoned for life, the other driven into exile, while Waltheof, the last of the English earls, who had dabbled in a hesitating way in this plot, was executed. There was never any serious danger, but the fact that under the new régime baronial rebellion was possible, despite of all William’s advantages over other feudal kings, and despite of the fact that the rebels were hardly yet settled firmly into their new estates, had a sinister import for the future of England. With the new monarchy there had come into England the anarchic spirit of continental feudalism. If such a man as the Conqueror did not overawe it, what was to be expected in the reigns of his successors? William had introduced into his new realm alike the barons, with their personal ambition, and the clerics of the school of Hildebrand, with their intense jealousy for the rights of the church. The tale of the dealings of his descendants with these two classes of opponents constitutes the greater part of English history for a full century.
William died at Rouen on the 7th of September 1087; on his death-bed he expressed his wish that Normandy should pass to his elder son, Robert, in spite of all his rebellions, but gave his second son William (known by the nickname of Rufus) the crown of England, and sent him William Rufus. thither with commendatory letters to archbishop Lanfranc and his other ministers. There was at first no sign of opposition to the will of the late king, and William Rufus was crowned within three weeks of his father’s decease. But the results of the Conquest had made it hard to tear England and Normandy apart. Almost every baron in the duchy was now the possessor of a smaller or a greater grant of lands in the kingdom, and the possibility of serving two masters was as small in 1087 as at any other period of the world’s history. By dividing his two states between his sons the Conqueror undid his own work, and left to his subjects the certainty of civil war. For the brothers Robert and William were, and always had been, enemies, and
