captives, than if he was merely led to place monks instead of canons at Saint Werburh's, and in the end to take the cowl among them himself.
Feeling as to the vacancy of the archbishopric. 1092.
Vacancy of Lincoln.
Anselm looked to as the coming archbishop.
But the planting of monks at Saint Werburh's had no
small effect on the destiny of Anselm and of England.
In the course of the year which saw the annexation of
Cumberland men began to be thoroughly wearied of the
long vacancy of the archbishopric. It may be that the
great gathering at Lincoln had brought home to every
mind the great wrong under which the Church was
suffering. The bishops of the land had come together
to a great ecclesiastical rite; but they had come together
as a body without a head. And they had parted under
circumstances which made the state of things even worse
than it had been when they met. The death of Remigius
had handed over another bishopric to the wardship
of Flambard. The land from the Thames to the Humber,
the great diocese which took in nine shires, was to be left
without a shepherd as long as Rufus and Flambard should
think good. That is, it was to be left till some one among
the King's servants should be ready to do by Lincoln as
Herbert Losinga had done by Thetford. Men began to
say among themselves that such unlaw as this could not
go on for ever; the land could not abide without a chief
pastor; an archbishop must soon come somehow, whether
the King and Flambard willed it or not. The feeling
was universal; and with it another feeling was almost
equally universal; when the archbishop should come, he
could come only in the shape of the man who was of all
men most worthy of the office, the man whom all England
knew and loved as if his whole life had been spent
within her seas, the holy Abbot of Bec.[1] That such was*
- ↑ Eadmer, Hist. Nov. 14. "Jam enim, quodam quasi præsagio mentes quorundam tangebantur, et licet clanculo, nonnulli adinvicem loquebantur, eum, si Angliam iret, archiepiscopum Cantuariensem fore." William of Malmesbury (Gest. Pont. 78), "Erat tamen spes nonnulla his malis posse
