But as yet the darkest times that men had known were the four years during which the sons of the English Church were left as sheep without a shepherd.
Anselm.
Debt of England to foreigners.
The Burgundian saints.
Hugh of Avalon.
The shepherd was at last to come, like his immediate
predecessor, in one sense from a distant land, in another
sense from a land which was only too near. The house
of Bec, the house of Herlwin, was for the second time to
give a patriarch to the isle of Britain. It had given us
Lanfranc the statesman; it was now to give us Anselm
the saint. We may reckon it, not as the shame, but as
the glory of our nation that we have so often won
strangers, and even conquerors, to become our national
leaders, and to take their place among the noblest
worthies of the soil. Alongside of the lawgiver from
Denmark, of the deliverer from France, we rank, as
holding the same place among bishops which they hold
among kings and earls, the holy man from the Prætorian
Augusta.[1] The annals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries
are thick set with the names of foreign prelates
holding English sees; and among them both Normandy
and Lorraine, to say nothing of Pavia, had sent us some
whom we might well be glad to welcome. But the two
whose names shine out above them all, the two from
whose names all thought of their foreign birth passes
away, the two whom we hail as our own by adoption
and love, came from a more distant realm, and a realm
which is well nigh forgotten. Hugh of Avalon and of
Lincoln came from the more favoured and famous district
where the Imperial Burgundy rises to the Alps and sinks
- ↑ Of the birthplace of Anselm and its buildings, some of which must have been fresh in his childhood, I attempted a little picture in my Historical and Architectural Sketches. The nature of the country is brought out with all clearness by Dean Church, Anselm, p. 8. Before him it had stirred up the local patriotism of M. Croset-Mouchet to the best things in his book.
