Chapter IV: The Primacy of Anselm and the Acquisition of Normandy.903 (1)

1093-1097.

[Sidenote: Character of the early years of William Rufus. 1087-1092.]

[Sidenote: Chronological sequence of the history.]

[Sidenote: More complicated character of the next period. 1093-1098.]

[Sidenote: Three distinct sets of contemporary events.]

[Sidenote: Aspects of Rufus with regard to each.]

[Sidenote: Primacy of Anselm.]

[Sidenote: Affairs of Scotland and Wales.]

[Sidenote: Continental schemes.]

[Sidenote: Revolt of Robert of Mowbray. 1095.]

The story of the first five years of the Red King’s reign may be written with little, if any, forsaking of strict chronological order. The accession, the rebellion, the affairs of Normandy, the affairs of Scotland, follow one another in successive or nearly successive years, as the main subjects which challenge our attention. One set of events leads to another. The rebellion followed naturally on the accession; the interference of Rufus in Normandy followed naturally on the rebellion; the Scottish invasion seems to have been the immediate occasion of the banishment of Eadgar from Normandy. But during the whole of the five years there is no great interlacing of different parts of the main story; at no stage are two distinct sets of events of equal moment going on at the same time; the historian is hardly called on to forsake the arrangement of the annalist. While the events recorded by the annalist were in doing, some of the greatest changes in English history were silently going on; but they were not changes of a kind which could be set down in the shape of annals. From the end of the year which saw the restoration of Carlisle the nature of the story changes. Different scenes of the drama of equal importance are now acting at once. For the next five years we have three several lines of contemporary story, which are now and then intertwined, but which on the whole did not seriously affect one another. Each is best told by itself, with as little reference to either of the others as may be. And each begins in the year of which we have now reached the threshold. The sixth year of William Rufus saw the beginning of the primacy of Anselm, the beginning of the main dealings of the reign with Wales and Scotland, the beginning of renewed interference in the Norman duchy. It will be well to keep these three lines of narrative as distinct as may be. They show the Red King in three different characters. In the first story he appears as the representative of the new form which the kingship of England has taken with reference both to temporal and to spiritual matters within the kingdom. In the second story we see him asserting the powers of the English crown beyond the kingdom of England, but within the island of Britain. And here, alongside of the affairs of Scotland, perhaps not very closely connected with them by any chain of cause and effect, but forming one general subject with them as distinguished alike from purely domestic and from continental affairs, will come the relations between England and Wales during the reign of William Rufus. In the third story we see the beginning of the events which led to those wider schemes of continental policy which almost wholly occupy the last three years of the reign. One event only of much moment stands apart from the general thread of any of the three stories. It stands by itself, as one of those events which might easily have led to great changes, but which, as a matter of fact, passed away without much result. This is the conspiracy and revolt of Robert of Mowbray and William of Eu, which may, dramatically at least, be connected with either the Scottish or the Norman story, but which, as a matter of actual English history, stands apart from all.

[Sidenote: Relations between Rufus and Anselm.]

[Sidenote: Working of the new ideas.]

[Sidenote: New position of the King.]

[Sidenote: Ecclesiastical position of the Conqueror.]

[Sidenote: William and Lanfranc.]

[Sidenote: Opposite conduct of Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Vacancy of the see of Canterbury. 1089-1093.]

[Sidenote: Its policy.]

[Sidenote: Influence of Randolf Flambard.]

Of these three the first on the list must claim the precedence. The relations between Rufus and Anselm involve the whole civil and ecclesiastical policy of the reign. The dispute between King and Primate was the outcome of all that had been working in silence while the Red King was winning castles in Normandy, receiving the homage of Scotland, and enlarging the bounds of England. During those years one side of the results of the Norman Conquest was put into formal shape. Between the fall of Rochester and the restoration of Carlisle, new ideas, new claims, had come to their full growth. Those ideas, those claims, had made the kingship of William the Red something marked by not a few points of difference from the kingship either of the Confessor or of the Conqueror. Nowhere does the difference between the elder and the younger William stand forth more clearly than in their dealings with the spiritual power. No king, as I have often shown, was more truly Supreme Governor of the Church within his realm than was the Conqueror of England, her defender against the claims of Rome. But William the Great sought and found his fellow-worker in all things in an archbishop likeminded with himself. We can hardly conceive the reign of the Conqueror without the primacy of Lanfranc. But the great object of William the Red was to avoid the restraints which could not fail to be placed upon his self-will, if he had one standing at his side whose place it was to be at once the chief shepherd of the English Church and the tribune of the English people. For three years and more from the death of Lanfranc the see of Canterbury remained vacant. Such a vacancy was without precedent; but it was designed itself to become a precedent. It was by no accident, from no momentary cause, that William delayed the appointment of any successor to his old guardian and counsellor. It was part of a deliberate policy affecting the whole ecclesiastical and civil institutions of the realm. And that policy, there can be little doubt, was the device of a single subtle and malignant genius by whom the whole internal administration of the Red King’s reign was guided.

§ 1. _The Administration of Randolf Flambard._

1089-1099.

[Sidenote: Early history of Flambard.]

[Sidenote: Said to have been settled in England T. R. E.]

[Sidenote: Said to have been in the service of Bishop Maurice [Bishop of London 1086-1107].]

[Sidenote: Said to have held the deanery of Twinham.]

[Sidenote: Preferments held by the clerks of kings and bishops.]

[Sidenote: Flambard a priest.]

[Sidenote: Character of Flambard.]

The chief minister, if we may so call him, of William Rufus, during these years, and indeed to the end of his reign, was that Randolf Flambard or Passeflambard of whom we have already heard.[904] His early history is not easy to trace, beyond the general fact that he rose to power by the same path by which so many others rose in his day, by service in the King’s chapel and chancery.[905] It has been generally thought that he was settled in England as early as the days of Eadward; but it may be doubted whether the evidence bears out this belief. And the course of his life is certainly easier to understand, if we do not bring him into England so soon, or attribute to him so great a length of life, as we must do if we look on him as having been already a land-owner in England before the Conquest.[906] On the other hand, if we accept the story which makes him pass to the King’s service from the service of Maurice Bishop of London, he must have been the King’s clerk for so short a time before the death of the Conqueror as hardly to give room for the usual stages of official promotion. Another version places him in the King’s service from his earliest years.[907] Perhaps we may guess that the name of the Bishop of London is wrongly given, and that Flambard had really been in the service of one of Maurice’s predecessors, of Hugh of Orival or of the more famous William. His reason for leaving his episcopal patron is said to have been that a deanery which he held was taken from him, a story which oddly connects itself with another, according to which he was at one time dean or other head of the canons of Twinham――better known as Christchurch――in Hampshire.[908] The story, true or false, like the earlier life of Thomas of London, illustrates the way in which the highest ecclesiastical preferments short of bishoprics and abbeys were held by these clerical servants of kings and bishops. Clerical they often were only in the widest sense; they were sometimes merely tonsured, and they seldom took priest’s orders till they were themselves promoted to bishoprics.[909] Randolf Flambard however was a priest;[910] he could therefore discharge the duties of his deanery in person, if he ever troubled himself to go near it. Otherwise there was very little of the churchman, or indeed of the Christian, about the future Bishop of Durham and builder of Saint Cuthberht’s nave. At all events it was wholly by his personal qualities, such as they were, that Randolf Flambard made his way to the highest places in Church and State. In his day the Church supplied the readiest opening for the service of the State, and service to the State was again rewarded by all but the highest honours of the Church.

[Sidenote: His parents.]

[Sidenote: The name _Flambard_.]

[Sidenote: His financial skill.]

[Sidenote: Mention of him in the Conqueror’s reign.]

[Sidenote: His share in Domesday.]

[Sidenote: His rise under Rufus.]

The man who was practically to rule England had at least little advantage on the score of birth. He is set before us as the son of a low-born priest in the diocese of Bayeux and of a mother who bore the character of a witch, and who was reported to have lost an eye through the agency of the powers with which she was too familiar.[911] Handsome in person, ready of wit, free of speech and of hand, unlearned, loose of life, clever and unscrupulous in business of every kind, he made friends and he made enemies; but he rose. The surname which cleaves to him in various shapes and spellings is said to have been given to him in the court of the Conqueror by the _dispenser_ Robert, because he pushed himself on at the expense of his betters, like a burning flame.[912] But his genius lay most of all in the direction of finance, in days when finance meant to transfer, by whatever means, the greatest amount of the subject’s money into the coffers of the King. One story describes him as sent on such an errand by the Conqueror into the lands of his future bishopric, and as smitten for his crime by the wonder-working hand of Saint Cuthberht himself.[913] There is every reason to believe that he had a hand in drawing up the Great Survey.[914] But, while William the Great lived, he seems not to have risen to any high place. Towards the end of his reign the Conqueror did begin to give away bishoprics to his own clerks,[915] but still hardly to such clerks as Randolf Flambard. Nor did the Conqueror need a minister, in the sense of needing one who should in some sort fill his place and exercise his powers. The elder William could rule his kingdom himself, or at most with the advice of the special counsellor whom ancient custom gave him in the person of Lanfranc. But the younger William, sultan-like in his mood, needed, like other sultans, the help of a vizier. And he found the fittest of all viziers for his purpose in the supple clerk from the Bessin.

[Sidenote: His alleged new Domesday.]

[Sidenote: His official position.]

[Sidenote: He holds the Justiciarship.]

[Sidenote: Growth of the office under him.]

[Sidenote: His “driving” of the Gemóts.]

[Sidenote: He loses his land for the New Forest.]

[Sidenote: His zeal for the King’s interests.]

The reign of Flambard seems to have begun as soon as Lanfranc was gone. He thoroughly suited the Red King’s views. He was ready to gather in wealth for his master from every quarter; he knew how to squeeze the most out of rich and poor; when a tax of a certain amount was decreed, he knew how to make it bring in double its nominal value.[916] He alone thoroughly knew his art; no one else, said the laughing King, cared so little whose hatred he brought on himself, so that he only pleased his master.[917] He stands charged in one account of his deeds with declaring the Great Survey to be drawn up on principles not favourable enough to the royal hoard, and with causing it to be supplanted by a new inquisition which made the Red King richer than his father.[918] This story is very doubtful; but it is thoroughly in character. In any case Flambard rose to the highest measure both of power and of official dignity that was open to him. His office and its duties are described in various ways; in that age official titles and functions were less accurately distinguished than they were a little later.[919] But there seems no doubt that Flambard, the lawyer whom none could withstand,[920] held the formal office of Justiciar. Till his time that post had not, as a distinct office, reached the full measure of its greatness. It was Flambard himself who raised it to the height of power and dignity which accompanied it when it was held by Roger of Salisbury and Randolf of Glanville. He was to the post of Justiciar what Thomas of London two generations later was to the post of Chancellor; he was the man who knew how to magnify his office.[921] In that office “he drave all the King’s gemóts over all England.”[922] The King’s thegns who had come to the local assembly on the King’s errand in the days of Æthelred and Cnut[923] had now grown into a mighty and terrible power. How Flambard drave the gemóts we learn elsewhere. He was fierce alike to the suppliant and to the rebel.[924] Suppliant and rebel alike were in his eyes useful only as means for further filling the mighty chest at Winchester. Strangely enough, he himself, clerk and Norman as he was, had found neither birth nor order protect him when the Conqueror had needed a part of his land for the creation of the New Forest.[925] On the principle that man is ever most ready to inflict on others the wrongs which he has borne himself, Flambard, who himself in some sort ranked among the disinherited, was of all ministers of the royal will the most eager to draw the heritage of every man, without respect to birth or order, into the hands of the master whom he served too faithfully.

[Sidenote: His changes and exactions systematic.]

[Sidenote: His alleged spoliation of the rich.]

[Sidenote: His dealings with the Ætheling Henry.]

[Sidenote: Witness of the Chronicle.]

[Sidenote: The King to be every man’s heir.]

[Sidenote: Flambard’s lasting burthens and exactions.]

But we shall altogether misunderstand both Flambard and his master, if we take either of them for vulgar spoilers, living as it were from hand to mouth, and casually grasping any sources of gain which chanced to be thrown in their way. Whatever Flambard did he did according to rule and system; nay more, he did it according to the severest rules of logic. Amidst the vague declamations which set him before us as the general robber of all men, we light on particular facts and phrases which give us the clue to the real nature of his doings. It is worth notice that, in more than one picture, the rich are enlarged on as the special victims of his extortions; in one the Ætheling Henry himself is spoken of as having suffered deeply at his hands.[926] We may guess that this has some special reference to the way in which Henry was defrauded of the lands of his mother, a business in which Flambard is likely enough to have had a share.[927] These references to the wrongs done to the rich have their significance; they point to a cunningly devised system of Flambard’s, by which, the greater a man’s estate was, the more surely was he marked for extortion. The legislation of Flambard, if we can call that legislation which seems never to have been set down in any formal statute,[928] was not at all of the kind which catches the small flies and lets the large ones get through. As we have seen in some other cases,[929] a seemingly casual expression of our native Chronicler is the best record of a matter of no small constitutional importance. The Red King “would be ilk man’s heir, ordered and lewd.”[930] In those words lay the whole root of the matter. The great work of the administration of Flambard, the great work of the reign of Rufus, was to put in order a system of rules by which the King might be the heir of every man. Those few words, which might seem to have dropped from the Chronicler in a moment of embittered sarcasm, do indeed set forth the formal beginning of a series of burthens and exactions under which Englishmen, and preeminently the rich and noble among Englishmen, groaned for not much less than six hundred years after Flambard’s days.

[Sidenote: The Feudal Tenures.]

[Sidenote: Abolished 1660.]

[Sidenote: Tenure in chivalry.]

[Sidenote: Wardship.]

[Sidenote: Marriage.]

[Sidenote: Dealings with bishoprics and abbeys.]

[Sidenote: Agency of Flambard in systematizing the feudal tenures.]

[Sidenote: The evidence.]

[Sidenote: Henry’s charters.]

[Sidenote: Importance of seemingly casual phrases.]

In short the “unrighteousness” ordained by William Rufus and Randolf Flambard[931] are no other than those feudal tenures and feudal burthens which even the Parliament which elected Charles the Second, in the midst of its self-abasement and betrayal of its own ancient rights, declared to have been “much more burthensome, grievous, and prejudicial to the kingdom than they have been beneficial to the king.”[932] Assuredly they were as burthensome, grievous, and prejudicial to the kingdom in the eleventh century as they were in the seventeenth; but assuredly they were found in the eleventh century to be highly beneficial to the King, or they would not have been ordained by Rufus and Flambard. We have reached the age of chivalry; and tenure in chivalry, with all its mean and pettifogging incidents, was put into a systematic form for the special benefit of the coffers of the king who was before all things the good knight, the _preux chevalier_, the _probus miles_. The King “would be the heir of ilk man, ordered and lewd.” To that end the estate of the minor heir was to be made a prey; he was himself to be begged and granted and sold like an ox or an ass;[933] the heiress, maid or widow, was in the like sort to be begged and granted, sold into unwilling wedlock, or else forced to pay the price which a chivalrous tenure demanded for the right either to remain unmarried or to marry according to her own will. The bishopric or the abbey was to be left without a pastor, and its lands were to be let to farm for the King’s profit, because the King would be the heir of the priest as well as of the layman. That all this, in its fully developed and systematic form, was the work of Randolf Flambard, I hope I may now assume. I have argued the point at some length elsewhere,[934] and I need not now do more than pass lightly over some of the main points. Certain tendencies, certain customs, of which, under the Conqueror and even before the Conqueror, we see the germs, but only the germs, appear at the accession of Henry the First as firmly established rules, which Henry does not promise wholly to abolish, while he does promise to redress their abuses. It follows that they had put on their systematic shape in the intermediate time, that is, during the reign of Rufus. One of these abuses, that which for obvious reasons was most largely dwelled on by our authorities, namely the new way of dealing with ecclesiastical property, is distinctly spoken of as a novelty, and a novelty of Flambard’s devising. The obvious inference is that the whole system, a system which logically hangs together in the most perfect way, was the device of the same subtle and malignant brain. And having got thus far, we are now enabled to see the full force of those seemingly casual expressions in the writers of the time of which I have already spoken. It was the royal claims of relief, of wardship, and marriage, systematically and mercilessly enforced, no less than the royal claim to enjoy the fruits of vacant ecclesiastical benefices, which are branded in Latin as the _injustitiæ_ of Rufus and Flambard, and which in our own tongue take the shape of the King’s claim to be the heir of every man.

[Sidenote: Flambard’s theory of land-holding.]

[Sidenote: Relief and redemption.]

[Sidenote: Dealings with men’s wills.]

[Sidenote: Older theory of wills.]

This last pithy phrase takes in all the new claims which were now set up over all lands, whether held by spiritual or temporal owners, and, in some cases at least, over personal property also. All the “unrighteousnesses,” all “the evil customs,” which the charter of Henry promises to reform[935] come under this one head. In Flambard’s system of tenure there could be no such thing as an ancient _eðel_ or _allod_, held of no lord, and burthened only with such payments or duties as the law might lay upon its owner. With him all land was in the strictest sense _loanland_.[936] The owner had at most a life-interest in it; at his death it fell back to the king, for the king was to be the heir of every man. The king might grant it to the son of the last owner; but, if so, it was by a fresh grant,[937] for which the new grantee had to pay. And the terms of Henry’s charter imply that the payment was arbitrary and extortionate. Henry promises that the heir of a tenant-in-chief shall not be constrained to _redeem_――to buy back――his father’s lands as had been done in his brother’s time; he shall _relieve_ them by a just and lawful relief.[938] Under Rufus then it was held that the land had, by the former holder’s death, actually passed to the king, as the common heir of all men, and that, if the son or other representative of the former holder wished to possess it, he must, in the strictest sense, buy it back from the king. Henry acknowledges the rights of the heir, while still maintaining the theory of the fresh grant. The heir is not to _redeem_――to buy back――his father’s land; he is merely to _relieve_ it――to take it up again, and he is to pay only the sum prescribed by legal custom, the equivalent of the ancient heriot or the modern succession-duty. So it is with personal property. The Red King, it is plain, claimed to be the heir of men’s money, as well as of their land. For one of Henry’s promised reforms is that the wills of his barons and others his men shall stand good, that their money shall go to the purposes to which they may have bequeathed it, and that, if they die without wills, their wives, children, kinsfolk, or lawful men, shall dispose of it as they may think best for the dead man’s soul.[939] Such a reform could not have been needed unless William Rufus had been in the habit of interfering with men’s free right of bequest. And it might have been plausibly argued that the right of bequest was no natural right of man, that the most ancient legal doctrine both of Rome and of England was that a will was an exceptional act, which needed the confirmation of the sovereign power. If such a doctrine had anyhow come to the knowledge of Flambard, it would assuredly seem to him a natural inference that no such confirmation should be granted save at such a price as the king might see fit to demand.

[Sidenote: Wardship.]

[Sidenote: Its logical character.]

[Sidenote: Its oppressive working.]

But of all the devices of Flambard, there was one which, it would seem, was specially his own, one which was at once the most oppressive of all and that which followed most logically from the nature of feudal tenure. This was the lord’s right of wardship. This claim starts from the undoubted doctrine that the fief is after all only a conditional possession of its holder, that he holds it only on the terms of discharging the military service which is due from it. Nothing was easier than to argue that, when the fief passed to an heir who was from his youth incapable of discharging that service, the fief should go back into the lord’s hands till the heir had reached the time of life when he could discharge it. The abuses and oppressions which such a right led to need hardly be dwelled on; they are written in every page of our legal history from the days of Rufus to the days of Charles the First. Nothing now enriches an estate like a long minority; in those times the heir, when at last he came into possession, found his estate impoverished in every way by the temporary occupation of the king or of the king’s favourite to whom the wardship had been granted or sold. Yet it cannot be denied that the argument by which the right of wardship was established was, as a piece of legal argument, quite unanswerable. And of all the feudal exactions certainly none was more profitable. The tenant-in-chief who died, perhaps fighting in the king’s cause, and who left an infant son behind him, had the comfort of thinking that his estate would, perhaps for the next twenty years, go to enrich the coffers of his sovereign. On this head Henry speaks less clearly than he speaks on some other points; but his words certainly seem to imply that the wardship of the tenant-in-chief was to go, not to the king, but to the mother or to some kinsman.[940] If so, either Henry himself or his successors thought better of the matter. The right of wardship, as a privilege of the king or other lord, appears in full force in the law-book of Randolf of Glanville.[941]

[Sidenote: Extent of Flambard’s changes.]

[Sidenote: Wardship and marriage special to England and Normandy.]

[Sidenote: The two sides of feudalism.]

[Sidenote: England in what sense feudal.]

[Sidenote: Flambard the lawgiver of English feudalism.]

When we attribute all these exactions and “unrighteousnesses” to the device of Flambard, it is of course not meant that they were altogether unheard of either before his day or beyond the lands over which his influence reached. Traces of these claims, or of some of them, are to be found wherever and whenever feudal notions about the tenure of land had crept in. All that is meant is that claims which were vaguely growing up were put by Flambard into a distinct and systematic shape. What William the Great did on occasion, for reasons of state, William the Red did as a matter of course, as an ordinary means of making money.[942] And it is significant that two of the most oppressive of these claims, that of wardship and the kindred claim of marriage, were, in their fully developed shape, peculiar or nearly so to the lands where Rufus reigned and Flambard governed, to the English kingdom and the Norman duchy.[943] I have said elsewhere that, of the two sides of feudalism, our Norman kings carefully shut out the side which tended to weaken the royal power, and carefully fostered the side which tended to strengthen it.[944] Both sides of this process were busily at work during the reign of Rufus. The great law of the Conqueror, the law of Salisbury, which decreed that duty to the king should come before all other duties, was practically tried and practically confirmed in the struggle which showed that no man in England was strong enough to stand against the king.[945] England was not to become feudal in the sense in which Germany and France became feudal. But in all those points where the doctrines of feudal tenure could be turned to the king’s enrichment, England became of all lands the most feudal. Enactor of no statute, author of no code or law-book, Randolf Flambard was in effect the lawgiver of feudalism, so far as that misleading word has any meaning at all on English soil.

[Sidenote: Flambard’s oppression falls most directly on the greatest estates.]

[Sidenote: No special oppression of the native English.]

[Sidenote: Indirect oppression of other classes.]

[Sidenote: Dealings of the tenants-in-chief with their under-tenants.]

[Sidenote: Strange submission of the nobles.]

[Sidenote: Position of the king’s clerks.]

[Sidenote: The reign of unlaw.]

[Sidenote: General submission.]

All this exactly falls in with those phrases in our authorities which speak of Flambard as the spoiler of the rich, the plunderer of the inheritances of other men. It also bears out what I have said already,[946] that there is no evidence to show that Rufus was a direct oppressor of the native English as such. The subtle devices of tyranny of which we have just spoken directly concerned those only who were the King’s tenants-in-chief. That is to say, they touched a class of estates which were far more largely in Norman than in English hands. Most likely, even in that reign, a numerical majority of the King’s tenants-in-chief would have been found to be of English blood. But such a majority would have been chiefly made up of the very smallest members of the class; the greater landowners, those whose wrongs, under such a system, would be, if not heavier, at least more conspicuous, were mainly the conquerors of Senlac or their sons. It was a form of oppression which would strike men as specially falling upon the rich. A special meaning is thus given to phrases which might otherwise be thought to be merely those common formulæ which, in speaking of any evil which affects all classes, join rich and poor together. The devices of Flambard were specially aimed at the rich. The great mass of the English people, and that large class of Normans who held their lands, not straight of the king but of some intermediate lord, were touched by them only when the lords who suffered by Flambard’s exactions tried to make good their own losses by exactions of the same kind on their own tenants. That they did so is shown by the reforming charter of Henry. When he promises to deal fairly and lawfully by his barons and his other men in the matters of relief and marriage, he demands that his barons shall deal fairly and lawfully by their men in the like cases.[947] But in the first instance it was mainly the rich, mainly the Normans, whom the feudal devices of Flambard touched. And it is not the least strange thing in these times to see a race of warlike and high-spirited nobles, conquerors or sons of conquerors, submit to so galling a yoke, a yoke which must have been all the more galling when we think of the origin and position of the man by whom it was devised. We cannot think that the king’s clerks were ever a popular body with any class, high or low, native or foreign. Their position appealed to no sentiment of any kind, military, religious, or national; their rule rather implied the treading under foot of all such sentiments. The military tenants must have looked on them with the dislike which men of the sword, specially in such an age, are apt to look on the rule of men of the pen. In the eyes of strict churchmen they must have passed for ungodly scorners of the decencies of their order. To the mass of the people they must have seemed foreign extortioners, and nothing more. They represented the power of the king, and nothing else. In some states of things the power of the king, even of a despotic king, may be welcomed as the representative of law against force. But under Rufus the power of the king was before all things the representative of unlaw. Yet though all murmured, all submitted. The son of the poor priest of the Bessin, clothed with a power purely official, lorded it over all classes and orders. Earls, prelates, and people, were alike held down by the guide and minister of the royal will.

[Sidenote: Position of Rufus favourable for his schemes.]

[Sidenote: Effect on national unity.]

One cause of this general submission is doubtless to be found in the immediate circumstances of the time. The alliance of the King and the English people had for the moment broken the power of the Norman nobles. The ecclesiastical estate was left without a head by the death of Lanfranc. The popular estate was left without a head, as soon as the King turned away from the people who had given him his crown, and broke all the promises that he had made to them. There was no power of combination; the great days when nobles, clergy, and commons, could join together against the king, as three orders in one nation, were yet far distant. Each class had to bear its own grievances as it could; no class could get any help from any other class; and the King’s picked mercenaries, kept at the expense of all classes, were stronger than any one class by itself. Yet we cannot doubt that even the rule of Rufus and Flambard did something towards the great work of founding national unity. All the inhabitants of the land, if they had nothing else in common, had common grievances and a common oppressor. For a moment we can believe that the English people would feel a certain pleasure in seeing the men who had once conquered them and whom they had more lately conquered, brought under the yoke, and under such a yoke as that of Flambard. But such a feeling would be short-lived compared with the far deeper feeling of common grievances and common enmities.

[Sidenote: Other forms of exaction.]

[Sidenote: Working of the old laws.]

[Sidenote: “Driving” of the Gemóts.]

[Sidenote: Witness of Henry’s charter.]

For the yoke of Flambard was one which, in different ways, pressed on all classes. If the native English, and the less wealthy men generally, were less directly touched by his feudal legislation than those who ranked above them, Flambard had no mind to let poor men, or native Englishmen, or any other class of men, go scot free. If his new devices pressed mainly on the great, he knew how to use the old forms of law so as to press on great and small alike. No one was too high, no one was too low, for the ministers of the King’s Exchequer to keep their eyes on him. No source of profit was deemed too small or too mean, if the coffers of a chivalrous king could be filled by it. If Flambard sought to seize upon every man’s heritage, he also _drave_ all the King’s gemóts over all England. We have no details; but it is easy to see how the ancient assemblies, and the judicial and administrative business which was done in them, might be turned into instruments of extortion. We have seen that the worst criminals could win their pardon by a bribe,[948] and means might easily be found, by false charges and by various tricks of the law, for wringing money out of the innocent as well as the guilty. We may again turn to Henry’s charter. It is a very speaking clause which forgives all “pleas” and debts due to his brother, except certain classes of them which were held to be due of lawful right.[949] In the days of Rufus and Flambard the presumption was that a demand made on behalf of the crown was unlawful.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Dealings with church property.]

[Sidenote: Appointment and investiture of bishops and abbots.]

[Sidenote: Grant of the temporalities by the king.]

[Sidenote: Church lands become fiefs.]

[Sidenote: Flambard’s inferences.]

[Sidenote: Analogy between lay and ecclesiastical fiefs.]

[Sidenote: Vacant prelacies held by the King.]

[Sidenote: Power of prolonging the vacancy.]

[Sidenote: Sale of bishoprics and abbeys.]

[Sidenote: Innovations of Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Earlier cases of simony.]

[Sidenote: Not systematic before Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Treatment of vacant churches.]

[Sidenote: Flambard the chief agent.]

But there is one form of the exactions of the Red King which, for obvious reasons, stands forth before all others in the pages of the writers of the time. When the King would be the heir of every man, he was fully minded to be the heir of the clerk or the monk as well as of the layman. And Flambard, priest and chaplain as he was, had no mind to sacrifice the interests of his master to the interests of his order. By his suggestion William began early in his reign, as soon as the influence of Lanfranc was withdrawn, to make himself in a special way the heir of deceased bishops and abbots. These great spiritual lords were among the chief land-owners of the kingdom. The kings therefore naturally claimed to have a voice in their appointment. They invested the new prelate with his ring and staff; and this right, so fiercely denied to the successor of Augustus, was exercised without dispute by the successor of Cerdic and Rolf.[950] The new prelate received, by the king’s writ, as a grant from the king, the temporal possessions which were attached to the spiritual office.[951] We have seen that this action on the part of the king by no means wholly shut out action either on the part of the local ecclesiastical body or on the part of the great council of the kingdom.[952] But it was from the king personally that the newly chosen or newly nominated prelate received the actual investiture of his office and its temporalities. The temporalities with which he was invested might have their special rights and privileges; but at least they were not exempt from the three burthens which no land could escape, among which was the duty of providing men for military service in case of need.[953] As feudal ideas grew, the inference was easy that lands granted by the king and charged with military service were a fief held of the king by a military tenure. We have seen signs of change in that direction in the days of the Conqueror;[954] in the days of Rufus the doctrine was fully established, and it was pushed to its logical results by the lawyer-like ingenuity of Flambard. If the lands held by a bishop or abbot were a fief held by military tenure, they must be liable to the same accidents as other fiefs of the same kind. When a bishop or abbot died, or otherwise vacated his office, the result was the same as when the lay holder of a fief died without leaving an heir of full age. There was the fief; but there was no one ready to perform the duties with which it was charged. The fief must therefore fall back to the lord till it should be granted afresh to some one who could discharge those duties. The king thus, in the words of the Chronicler, became the heir of the deceased bishop or abbot, even more thoroughly than he became the heir of the deceased baron or other lay tenant-in-chief. For in the latter case, except when the late holder’s family became extinct by his death, there was always some one person who had by all law and custom a right above all other men to succeed him. The son or other natural successor might be constrained to buy back the lands of the _ancestor_,[955] or, if a minor, he might be kept out of them till his time of wardship was over. Still even Flambard would have allowed that such a natural successor had, if he could pay the price demanded, a claim upon the land which was not shared by any one else. But on the lands of a deceased bishop or abbot no man, even of his own order, had any better claim than another till such a claim was created by election or nomination. The king was the only heir; the lands and all the other property of the vacant office passed into his hands; and, as no election or nomination could hold good without his consent, it was in his power to prolong his possession as heir as long as he thought good. That is to say, by the new device of Flambard, when a bishop or abbot died, the king at once entered on his lands, and kept them as long as the see or abbey remained vacant. And, as it rested with the king when the see or abbey should be filled, he could prolong the vacancy for any time that he thought good. And William Rufus commonly thought good to prolong the vacancy till some one offered him such a price in ready money as made it worth his while to put an end to it.[956] The result was that, in the words of the Chronicler, “God’s Church was brought low.”[957] The great ecclesiastical offices, as they fell vacant, were either kept vacant for the King’s profit, or else were sold for his profit to men who, by the very act of buying them, were shown to be unworthy to hold them.[958] We are distinctly told that this practice was an innovation of the days of Rufus, and that it was an innovation of which Flambard was the author.[959] The charge of simony, like all other charges of bribery and corruption, is often much easier to bring than to disprove; but it is not likely to be spoken of as a systematic practice, unless it undoubtedly happened in a good many cases. We have come across cases in our earlier history where it was at least suspected that ecclesiastical offices had been sold, or, what proves even more, that they were looked on as likely to be sold.[960] And that the practice was common among continental princes there can be little doubt. But there is nothing to make us believe that it was at all systematic in England at any earlier time, and the Conqueror at all events was clear from all scandal of the kind. But the chain of reasoning devised by Flambard would make it as fair a source of profit for the king to take money on the grant of a bishopric as to take it on the grant of a lay fief. And there is no reason to doubt that Rufus systematically acted on this principle, and that, save at the moment of his temporary repentance, he seldom or never gave away a bishopric or abbey for nothing. The other point of the charge, that bishoprics and abbeys were kept vacant while the king received the profits, was not a matter of surmise or suspicion, but a matter of fact open to all men. When a prelate died, one of the king’s clerks was sent to take down in writing a full account of all his possessions. All was taken into the king’s hands. Sometimes the king granted out the lands for money or on military tenure, in which case the new prelate, when one was appointed, might have some difficulty in getting them back.[961] In other cases the king kept the property in his own hands, letting it out at the highest rent that he could get, and, as his father did with the royal demesnes, at once making void his bargains if a higher price was offered.[962] In the case of the abbeys and of those churches of secular canons where the episcopal and capitular estates were not yet separated, the king took the whole property of the church, and allowed the monks or canons only a wretched pittance.[963] We have seen that, in one case where local gratitude has recorded that he did otherwise, it is marked as an exception to his usual practice.[964] And, in all these doings, Flambard, as he was the deviser of the system, was its chief administrator. The vacant prelacies were put under his management; he extorted, for his own profit and for the king’s, such sums both from the monks or clergy and from the tenants of the church lands that they all said that it was better to die than to live.[965]

[Sidenote: The practice a new one.]

[Sidenote: The olden practice.]

[Sidenote: Tenure in _frank-almoign_.]

[Sidenote: Odo Abbot of Chertsey resigns, 1092.]

[Sidenote: Restored by Henry, 1100.]

These doings on the part of Rufus are by the writers of the time put in marked contrast with the practice of earlier kings, and especially with the practice of his own father. As the old and inborn kings had done nothing of the kind, so neither had the Conqueror from beyond sea. In their days, when an abbot or bishop died, his spiritual superior, the bishop of the diocese or the archbishop of the province, administered the estates of his church during the vacancy, bestowing the income to pious and charitable uses, and handing the estates over to the new prelate on his appointment.[966] In later legal language, the guardian of the spiritualties was also the guardian of the temporalities. Bishoprics and abbeys were dealt with as smaller preferments have always been dealt with, as holdings in _frank-almoign_. The novelty lay, not in receiving the bishopric or abbey from the king, but in receiving it on the terms of a lay fief. One prelate, Odo Abbot of Chertsey, the Norman successor of the English Wulfwold,[967] resigned his post rather than hold it on such terms.[968] For the rest of the reign of Rufus the estates of the abbey were left in the hands of Flambard. One of the earliest among the reforms of Henry and Anselm was the restoration of Odo.[969]

[Sidenote: Vacancies longer in abbeys than in bishoprics.]

[Sidenote: Walkelin dies. Jan. 3, 1098.]

[Sidenote: Osmund dies. Dec. 3, 1099.]

[Sidenote: Differences between bishoprics and abbeys.]

[Sidenote: Case of Peterborough. 1098.]

[Sidenote: English abbots.]

[Sidenote: Story of the appointment to an unnamed abbey.]

If we look more minutely into the chronology of this reign, it will appear that these long vacancies were more usual in the case of the abbeys than in that of the bishoprics. At the time of William’s death he had in his hands, besides the archbishopric of the absent Anselm, the two bishoprics of Winchester and Salisbury and eleven abbeys.[970] Of these Winchester had been vacant rather more than two years and a half, Salisbury had been vacant only eight months. And the bishoprics which were filled in his reign had mostly been vacant one, two, or at most three years, shorter times than bishoprics were often kept vacant in much later times.[971] The reason for the difference seems clear. The bishoprics, when they were filled, commonly went to the king’s clerks, to Flambard himself and his fellows. The great temporal position of a bishopric was acceptable to men of this class, and they found in the king’s service the means of making up a purse such as would tempt the king to end the vacancy in their favour[972]. A bishopric was therefore likely to be filled, unworthily filled doubtless, but still filled, before any very long time had passed. The abbeys, on the other hand, would have small attractions for the king’s servants, who in fact, as secular clerks, could not hold them. And the men for whom such a post would have attractions, the monks of the vacant abbey or the abbots or priors of lesser houses, would not have the same means as the king’s servants of making up a purse. The abbeys therefore were likely to remain vacant longer than the bishoprics. When they were filled, it was not without simony, or at least not without a payment of some kind to the King. For it is rather harsh to apply the word simony to the payment by which the monks of Peterborough bought of the King the right to choose an abbot freely――a free _congé d’élire_ in short, without any letter missive.[973] Another thing may be noticed. The bishops appointed at this time all bear Norman names; Normans were the most likely men to find their way into the King’s chapel and chancery. But the abbots are still not uncommonly English.[974] Rufus, who welcomed brave mercenaries from any quarter, also welcomed bribes from any quarter, with little of narrow prejudice for or against particular nations. An English monk was as likely as his Norman fellow to have, by some means quite inconsistent with his rule, scraped together money enough to purchase preferment. And when a body of monks bought the right of free election, they were likely to choose an Englishman rather than a stranger. At all times the kings interfered less with the elections to abbeys than they did with the elections to bishoprics.[975] And, if there is any truth, even as a legendary illustration, in a tale which is told both of Rufus and of other kings, there were moments when the Red King could prefer a practical joke to a bribe. An abbey――the name is not given――is vacant; two of its monks come to the King, trying to outbid one another in offers of money for the vacant office. A third brother has come with them, and the King asks what he will give. He answers that he will not give anything; he has simply come to receive the new abbot, whoever he may be, and to take him home with all honour. Rufus at once bestows the abbey on him, as the only one of the party worthy of it.[976] The tale is not impossible; had it been placed in Normandy and not in England, we might have even said that it was not unlikely. For we shall see, as we go on, that, from whatever cause, Rufus dealt with ecclesiastical matters in Normandy in a different spirit from that in which he dealt with them in England.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Sees vacant in 1092.]

[Sidenote: Ralph Luffa Bishop of Chichester. 1091-1123.]

[Sidenote: Death of William Bishop of Thetford. 1091.]

[Sidenote: Herbert Losinga.]

[Sidenote: Prior of Fécamp.]

[Sidenote: Abbot of Ramsey. 1087.]

[Sidenote: He buys the see of Thetford.]

[Sidenote: Three years’ vacancy of New Minster. 1088-1091.]

[Sidenote: Robert Losinga Abbot. 1091-1093.]

[Sidenote: Herbert repents and receives his bishopric again from the Pope, c. 1093.]

[Sidenote: Novelty of Herbert’s act.]