Chapter IV: The Primacy of Anselm and the Acquisition of Normandy.903 (2)

At the point which we have reached in our general story, the time of the restoration of Carlisle, two English sees only were vacant. Two had been filled during the year of the Norman campaign, and both of them by prelates of some personal mark. Ralph Luffa, Bishop of Chichester, holds a high place in the history of his own church, as the founder alike of the existing fabric and of the existing constitution of its chapter.[977] He bears altogether so good a character that he is not likely to have come to a bishopric in the way which was usual in the days of Rufus. Did the King give him his staff in some passing better moment, like that in which he gave the staff to the worthy abbot at the nameless monastery? But the other episcopal appointment of the same year was one of the usual kind, as far as the motive of the appointment went, though the person to whom the bishopric was given or sold was not one of the class who in this reign commonly profited by such transactions. Bishop William of Thetford, the successor of the unlearned Herfast,[978] died in the year of negotiations, the year of the peace with Robert and the peace with Malcolm.[979] His bishopric was not long kept vacant; before the end of the year the church of Thetford had a new pastor, and one who plays no small part in local history. This was the famous Herbert Losinga,[980] who, if we may trust such accounts of him as we have, made so bad a beginning and so good an ending. Norman by birth, an immediate countryman of the Conqueror, as sprung from the land of Hiesmes, a man of learning and evident energy, he became a monk of Fécamp and prior of that great house.[981] Early in the reign of Rufus or in the last days of the Conqueror, he was raised to the abbey of Ramsey, when the long and varied life of Æthelsige came to an end.[982] He now, on Bishop William’s death, at once bought for himself the see of Thetford for one thousand pounds.[983] Before the end of the year he was consecrated by Archbishop Thomas of York, making his profession to a future Archbishop of Canterbury.[984] At the same time he also bought preferment for his father Robert, who, it must be supposed, had embraced the monastic life. The New Minster of Winchester had now been for three years, since the death of its last Abbot Ralph, in the hands of Flambard.[985] Herbert now bought the abbacy for his father.[986] This twofold simony naturally gave great offence, and formed a fertile subject for the eloquence of the time, both in prose and verse.[987] The reign of the father was short; two years later Flambard again held the wardship of New Minster.[988] The career of the son in his East-Anglian bishopric was longer and more varied, and we shall come across him again in the course of our story. At present it is only needful to say that Herbert very soon repented of the shameful way by which he had climbed into the sheepfold, that he went to Rome, that he gave up his ill-gotten bishopric into the hands of Pope Urban, and received his staff from him again in what was deemed to be a more regular way.[989] Herbert’s repentance was to his credit; and, as things stood at the moment, there was perhaps no better way of making amends. But the course which he took was not only one which was sure to bring on him the displeasure of the Red King; it was in the teeth of all the customs of William the Great and of the kings before him. A journey to Rome, without the royal licence, and seemingly taken by stealth,[990] the submission to a Pope whom the King had not acknowledged,[991] the surrender to any Pope of the staff which he had received from the King of the English, were all of them offences, and the last act was distinctly a novelty. Ulf, Ealdred, Thomas, Remigius, had all been deprived of their staves and had received them again;[992] but no English prelate of those times had of his own act made the Pope his judge in such a matter. When the holy Wulfstan was threatened with deposition, he had, even in the legend, given back his staff, not to the Pope who ruled at Rome, but to the King who slept at Westminster.[993] No wonder then that the Red King was moved to anger by a slight to his authority which his father could not have overlooked, and which might have stirred the Confessor himself to one of his passing fits of wrath. The return of Herbert from Rome forms part of a striking group of events to which we shall presently come.

[Sidenote: Vacancy of Lincoln. 1092-1094.]

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

The two bishoprics of Chichester and Thetford were thus filled soon after they became vacant. In the year after the consecration of Ralph and Herbert, a third see, as we have seen, fell vacant by the death of Remigius of Lincoln.[994] That see was not filled so speedily as Chichester and Thetford had been; still it did not remain vacant so long as some of the abbeys. But a longer vacancy befell, a lasting vacancy seemed designed to befall, the mother church of all of them. All this while the metropolitan throne of Canterbury remained empty. No successor to Lanfranc was chosen or nominated; it was the fixed purpose of the Red King to make no nomination himself, to allow no choice on the part of the ecclesiastical electors. Here at least the doctrines of Randolf Flambard were to be carried out in their fulness. It is the state of ecclesiastical matters during this memorable vacancy, and the memorable nomination which at last ended it, which call for our main attention at this stage of our story.

§ 2. _The Vacancy of the Primacy and the Appointment of Anselm. 1089-1093._

[Sidenote: Effects of the vacancy of the see of Canterbury.]

[Sidenote: Special position of the metropolitan see.]

[Sidenote: Its antiquity and dignity.]

[Sidenote: Place of the Archbishop in the assembly.]

[Sidenote: His leadership of the nation.]

[Sidenote: Appointments to the archbishopric.]

[Sidenote: Thomas of London. 1162.]

[Sidenote: The King’s fixed purpose to keep the see vacant.]

It needs some little effort of the imagination fully to take in all that is implied in a four years’ vacancy of the see of Canterbury in the eleventh century. For the King to keep any bishopric vacant in order to fill his coffers with its revenues was a new and an unrighteous thing, against which men cried out as at once new and unrighteous. But to deal in this way with the see of Canterbury was something which differed in kind from the like treatment of any other see. That the bishopric of Lincoln was vacant, that the Bishop of Durham was in banishment, was mainly a local grievance. The churches of Lincoln and Durham suffered; they were condemned to what, in the language of the times, was called a state of widowhood. The tenants of those churches suffered all that was implied in being handed over from a milder lord to a harsher one. The dioceses were defrauded of whatever advantages might have flowed from the episcopal superintendence of Robert Bloet or of William of Saint-Calais. But the general affairs of the Church and realm might go on much the same; there was one councillor less in the gemót or the synod, and that was all. It was another thing when the patriarchal throne was left vacant, when Church and realm were deprived of him who in a certain sense might be called the head of both. An Archbishop of Canterbury was something more than merely the first of English bishops. Setting aside his loftier ecclesiastical claims as the second Pontiff of a second world, he held within the realm of England itself a position which was wholly his own.[995] He held an office older and more venerable than the crown itself. There were indeed kings in England before there were bishops; but there were Archbishops of Canterbury before there were Kings of the English. The successor of Augustine, the “head of Angle-kin,”[996] had been the embodiment of united English national life, in days when the land was still torn in pieces by the rivalry of the kings of this or that corner of it.[997] This lofty position survived the union of the kingdoms; it survived the transfer of the united kingdom to a foreign Conqueror. Lanfranc stood by the side of William, as Dunstan had stood by the side of Eadgar. In every gathering of the Church and of the people, in every synod, in every gemót, the Archbishop of Canterbury held a place which had no equal or second, a place which was shared by no other bishop or earl or ætheling. If we reckon the King as the head of the assembly, the Archbishop is its first member. If we reckon the King as a power outside the assembly, the Archbishop is himself its head. He is the personal counsellor of the King, the personal leader of the nation, in a way in which no other man in the realm could be said to be. As of old, under the Empire of Rome, each town had its _defensor civitatis_, so now, under the kingship of England, the successor of Augustine might be said to hold the place of _defensor regni_. The position which Lanfranc had held, and in which during these dreary years he had no successor, was a position wholly unlike that of the class of bishops to which we are now getting accustomed, royal officials who received bishoprics as the payment of their temporal services. It was equally unlike that of the statesman-bishops of later times, who might or might not forget the bishop in the statesman, but whose two characters, ecclesiastical and temporal, were quite distinct and in no way implied one another. An archbishop of those times was a statesman by virtue of his spiritual office; he was the moral guardian and moral mouth-piece of the nation. The ideal archbishop was at once saint, scholar, and statesman; of the long series from Augustine to Lanfranc, some had really united all those characters; none perhaps had been altogether lacking in all three. Hence the special care with which men were chosen for so great a place both before and for some time after the time with which we are dealing. The king’s clerks, his chancellor, his treasurer, even his larderer,[998] might beg or buy some bishopric of less account; but, seventy years after this time, the world was amazed when King Henry bethought him of placing Chancellor Thomas, not in the seat of Randolf of Durham or Roger of Salisbury, but in the seat of Ælfheah, Anselm, and Theobald.[999] The surprise which was then called forth by what was looked on as a new-fangled and wrongful nomination to the archbishopric of Canterbury may help us to judge of the surprise and horror and despair which came over the minds of men, as it became plain that the wish, perhaps the fixed purpose, of the Red King was to get rid of archbishops of Canterbury altogether.

[Sidenote: The King’s motives.]

[Sidenote: The estates of the see.]

[Sidenote: Further motives.]

The motives of the King are plain. He sought something more than merely to get possession of the rich revenues of the archbishopric, though that was doubtless not a small matter in the policy of either Rufus or Flambard. The estates of the see of Canterbury furnished a very perceptible addition to the royal income, and they gave the King a convenient means of rewarding some of his favourites, to whom he granted archiepiscopal lands on military tenure.[1000] Lanfranc himself had already done something like this;[1001] but the usual tendency of lands so granted to pass away from the Church would be greatly strengthened when it was not the Archbishop, but the King, at whose hands they had been received, and to whom the first homage had been paid. But all this was doubtless very secondary. In the case of other sees it was a mere reckoning of profit; Rufus had no objection to fill them at once, if any one would make it worth his while to do so. But it is plain that he had a fixed determination to keep the archbishopric vacant, if possible, for ever, at all events as long as the patience of his kingdom would endure such a state of things. To Rufus, whether as man or as king, the appointment of an archbishop was the thing of all others which was least to be wished. To fill the see of Canterbury would be at once to set up a disagreeable monitor by his side, and to put some check on the reign of unright and unlaw, public and private. William doubtless remembered how, as long as Lanfranc lived, he had had to play an unwilling part, and to put a bridle on his worst and most cherished instincts. An archbishop of his own naming could not indeed have the personal authority of his ancient guardian; but any archbishop would have a charge to speak in the name of the Church and the nation in a way which could hardly be pleasing in his ears. The metropolitan see therefore remained unfilled till the day when William Rufus became for a short season another man.

[Sidenote: No fear of a bad appointment.]

[Sidenote: Primates between Anselm and Thomas.]

It is worth remarking that what might have seemed a very obvious way out of the difficulty clearly did not come into the head of the King or of any one else. The long vacancy of the archbishopric made men uneasy; they were grieved and amazed as to what might happen in so unusual a case; but they felt sure that the present distress must end some time, and they seem to have taken for granted that, when it did end, it would end by the appointment of some one worthy of the place. Men were troubled at the King’s failure to appoint any archbishop; they do not seem to have been at all troubled by fear that he might appoint a bad archbishop.[1002] Rufus himself seems never to have thought of granting or selling the metropolitan see to any of his own creatures, to Flambard for instance or to Robert Bloet. He might so deal with Lincoln or Durham; something within or without him kept him from so dealing with Canterbury. It is throughout taken for granted that the choice lay between a good archbishop or none at all. A good archbishop was the yoke-fellow of a good king, the reprover of an evil king. William Rufus wanted neither of those. But even William Rufus had not gone so far, his subjects did not suspect him of going so far, as to think of appointing an evil archbishop in order to be the tool of an evil king. The precedent of making the patriarchal throne of Britain the reward of merely temporal services[1003] did not come till it had been filled by four more primates, all taken from the regular orders, numbering among them at least one saint and one statesman, but no mere royal official. The first degradation of the archbishopric led to its greatest exaltation, in the person of Thomas of London. But Thomas of London, even in his most worldly days, was a very different person from Randolf Flambard.

[Sidenote: Seemingly no thought of election.]

[Sidenote: No action of the monks.]

[Sidenote: No action of the Witan.]

[Sidenote: Silent endurance of the action.]

Another point to be remarked is how utterly the notion either of ecclesiastical election or of election in the Great Council of the realm seems to have passed away. There is nothing like an attempt at the choice of an archbishop, either by the monks of Christ Church, the usual electors, or by the suffragan bishops, who afterwards claimed the right. It might have been too daring a step if the monks had done as they once had done in the days of King Eadward,[1004] if they had chosen an archbishop freely, and then asked for the King’s approval of their choice. Eadward had rejected the prelate so chosen; William Rufus might have done something more than reject him. But we do not hear of their even venturing to petition for leave to elect; they do not, like the monks of Peterborough,[1005] make such a petition, and enforce it by the strongest of arguments. Nor do bishops, earls, thegns, the nation at large, venture to act, any more than the monks. They murmur, and that is all. No action on the subject is recorded to have been taken in any of the gemóts till the vacancy had lasted nearly four years; and we shall see that the action which was at last taken showed more strongly than anything else that, as far as this world was concerned, it rested wholly with the King whether England should ever again have another primate or not. Through the whole time, the nation suffers, but it suffers in silence. We have already had to deal with a king on whose nod all things human and divine were held to hang;[1006] we are now dealing with a king who would have no petition made, no act ascribed, within his realm, to any God or man except himself.[1007]

[Sidenote: Results, of the vacancy.]

[Sidenote: Corruption of the clergy.]

[Sidenote: Fiscal spirit of the time.]

[Sidenote: Effects of the lack of ecclesiastical discipline.]

The state of things during the time when William Rufus held firm to his purpose that no man should be archbishop but himself,[1008] and when the revenues of the archbishopric were paid into the hands of Randolf Flambard,[1009] was one of general corruption. It is immediately after recording the King’s way of dealing with bishoprics and abbeys that one of our chief guides breaks forth into his most vehement protest against the vices of the time, and specially against the corruption and degradation of the clergy.[1010] That they took to secular callings, that they became pleaders of causes and farmers of revenues, was not wonderful. Under the rule of Flambard there were endless openings for employments of this kind, employments for which, as in the case of Flambard himself, the clerk was commonly better fitted than the layman. And the general fiscal spirit of the time, the endless seeking after gold and silver of which the King set the example, naturally spread through all classes; every rich man, we are told, turned money-changer.[1011] The constant demands for actual coin, the large outlay of actual coin in the payment of the King’s mercenaries, must have led to an increased activity in the circulation of the precious metals. The newly-come Jews, strong in royal favour, doubtless found their account in this turn of things; but some classes of Christians seem to have found their account in it also. But, besides all this, the writers of the time seem clearly to connect the frightful profligacy of the time, specially rife among the King’s immediate following, with the vacancy of the archbishopric. It is true that things were not much better in Normandy, where the good soul of Archbishop William must have been daily grieved at the unlawful deeds of almost every one around him. But an Archbishop of Rouen had never been held to have the same authority over either prince or people as an Archbishop of Canterbury. Whatever power, moral or formal, was at any time wielded by the ecclesiastical state for the reformation of manners was altogether in abeyance, now that there was no Primate either to call together a synod of the national Church or to speak with that personal authority which belonged to none of the chiefs of the national Church but himself. Even darker times were in store, when there was a Primate in the land, but when his authority was defied and his person insulted. 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Anselm.]

[Sidenote: Debt of England to foreigners.]

[Sidenote: The Burgundian saints.]

[Sidenote: Hugh of Avalon.]

[Sidenote: Anselm of Aosta.]

[Sidenote: His parentage.]

[Sidenote: Associations of his youth.]

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.[1012] 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 again to the Rhone.[1013] Anselm of Aosta and of Canterbury came from that deep valley which, after all changes, is still Cisalpine Gaul. He came from that small outlying fragment of the Middle Kingdom which has not risen to the destiny of Unterwalden and Bern, of Lausanne and Geneva, but which has escaped the destiny of Bresse and Bugey, of Chablais and Nizza, of royal Arles and princely Orange, and of Hugh’s own home by the city of Gratian.[1014] The vale of Aosta, still Burgundian in its speech and buildings, the last remnant of the great Burgundian dominion of its lords, still gives a title to princes of the house of its earliest and of its latest Humbert. The father of Anselm, no less than the father of Lanfranc, was of Lombard birth. But Gundulf had been fully adopted at Aosta, and his son, born on Burgundian soil, son of a Burgundian mother of lofty, perhaps of princely stock,[1015] must be reckoned as belonging to the Burgundy in which he was born and bred rather than to the Italy which in after days he visited as a stranger.[1016] There, in the last home of old Gaulish freedom, in an Augusta named after the first Augustus――an Augusta which we doubt whether to call Prætorian from the conquerors or Salassian from the conquered――in the long valley fenced in by the giant Alps on either side――at the foot of the pass where local belief holds that Hannibal had crossed of old and where Buonaparte was to cross in days to come――there where the square walls of the Roman town rise almost untouched above the rushing Dora――where the street still bearing the name of Anselm leads from the Roman gate to the Roman arch of triumph, where the towers of Saint Gratus and Saint Urse, fellows of kindred towers at Verona and at Lincoln, at Schaffhausen and at Cambridge, rose fresh in all their squareness and sternness when Anselm lay as a babe beneath their shadow――there, among the sublimest works of nature and among some of the most striking works of man, was born the teacher of Normandy, the shepherd of England, the man who dived deeper than any man before him into the most awful mysteries of the faith, but whom we have rather to deal with as one who ranks by adoption among the truest worthies of England, the man who stood forth as the champion of right against both political and moral wrong in the days when both political and moral wrong were at their darkest.

[Sidenote: Comparison of Lanfranc and Anselm.]

[Sidenote: Anselm not preferred in England by the Conqueror.]

[Sidenote: Various sides of Anselm’s character.]

I have already pointed out the contrast between the characters of Lanfranc and Anselm, in recording one memorable discourse between them, in which Anselm won Lanfranc over to a better mind in the matter of our English Ælfheah.[1017] The calling and the work of the two men were different; and the work of Anselm implied the earlier work of Lanfranc. Lanfranc was, after all, in some sort a conqueror of the English Church, and the character of a conqueror was one in which Anselm could never have shown himself. Lanfranc was a statesman, one whose policy could spread itself far beyond the bounds of this or that kingdom or nation, but whose very policy compelled him not to let the distinctions of kingdoms and nations slip out of his sight. To Anselm we could almost fancy that such distinctions were of small account. He was the servant of God and the friend of all God’s creatures; he perhaps hardly stopped to think whether those whose souls and bodies he was ever ready to help were Burgundian, Norman, or English. With such a spirit as this, he could not have done Lanfranc’s work; and it is worthy of remark that the Conqueror, who so greatly valued him, seems never to have thought of him for any preferment in England. Lanfranc had to carry out a policy, in some measure harsh and worldly, but which, granting his own position and that of his master, could not be avoided. Anselm fittingly came after him, at a time when national distinctions and national wrongs were almost forgotten in the universal reign of evil, to protest in the name of universal right, and in so doing to protest against particular and national wrongs. He would have been out of place in the first days of the Conquest; as a stranger, though only as a stranger, he would have been out of place in the days of our earlier freedom. When he did come, he was thoroughly in place, as one who was before all things a preacher of righteousness, but who could, when need called for it, put on the mantle of the statesman and even that of the warrior. Like our own Wulfstan, in many things his fellow, we find him the friend and counsellor of men of a character most opposite to his own. And, as we have seen Wulfstan, if not commanding, at least directing, armies,[1018] so we shall see Anselm, if not waging war in his own person, at least hallowing more than one camp by his presence. And we can hardly blame him if, at some later stages of his career, he allowed himself to be swayed by scruples which he had never thought of at its beginning, if, in his zeal for eternal right, he allowed himself to sin against the ancient laws and customs of England. When England, Normandy, France, and the Empire, were as they all were in his day, we can forgive him for looking on the Roman Bishop as the one surviving embodiment of law and right, and for deeming that, when he spake, it was as when a man listened to the oracles of God.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Anselm and Eadmer.]

[Sidenote: References to Eadmer in other writers.]

[Sidenote: Church’s Life of Anselm.]

The tale of the early life of Anselm has been handed down to us by a loving companion, a man of our own nation, who was won in his youth by the kind words of the foreign saint when he came to England as a momentary visitor, and who in after times became the most faithful of disciples through all the changes of his fortunes. It is one of the marked features of the story that we know so little of Anselm, except from his own writings and from the narrative of Eadmer. Our own historians of the time speak of Anselm with the deepest reverence; but they say little of him beside the broad facts which lie on the surface of English history. Some of them directly refer to his special biographer for fuller accounts.[1019] In telling his story I find myself in the like case. I am tempted to refer once for all for the acts of Anselm to his Life as written in our own day by a master both of description and of comment.[1020] I could be well pleased to send my readers elsewhere to study Anselm the monk and abbot, and to concern myself only with his career as archbishop in our own land. But the earlier and the later career of Anselm hang together, and he has already made his appearance at more than one earlier stage of our own story. I must therefore attempt some general notice, though at less length than if the ground had not been thus forestalled, of the primate who came to us from Aosta, as his predecessor did from Pavia, and who, like his predecessor, made Bec a halting-place on the way to Canterbury.

[Sidenote: Childhood of Anselm.]

[Sidenote: His youthful licence.]

[Sidenote: He leaves Aosta. 1057.]

[Sidenote: His sojourn at Avranches.]

[Sidenote: He becomes a monk at Bec. 1060.]

[Sidenote: Elected prior. 1063.]

In the life of Anselm a childhood and a manhood of eminent holiness are parted by a short time of youthful licence. The little child in his dream climbed his native mountains to seek for the palace of God on a Christian Olympos. He reported the idleness of the handmaids of his Lord; he sat at the feet of his Lord; he was refreshed by the steward of the divine household with a meal of the purest bread.[1021] The scholarly boy was so eager for the monastic life that he prayed for some sickness that might drive him into the cloister.[1022] But the youth for a while cast aside his piety; he cast aside his learning; he gave himself to the thoughts and sports of the world; he even yielded to those temptations of the flesh which Wulfstan had withstood in the midst of his military exercises,[1023] and which Thomas withstood in the midst of his worldly business.[1024] But the love of his tender and pious mother kept him from wholly falling away. The yearning for a monastic life came upon him again, though his wishes were greatly opposed by his father. At last, in his twenty-fourth year, Anselm left his own land. After three years’ sojourn in Burgundy and France, he reached Normandy, and, in the steps of Lanfranc, first took up his abode at Avranches.[1025] But Lanfranc was now at Bec. Thither Anselm, fully bent on the monastic calling, followed the great scholar. He had doubted for a while between Bec and Clugny. We shall hardly think the worse of him for his frank confession of human feelings. He doubted, because at Clugny his human learning would be of no use, while at Bec it would be overshadowed by that of Lanfranc.[1026] In the end, by the advice of Lanfranc himself and of Archbishop Maurilius, he became a monk of Bec, and, when Lanfranc became Abbot of Saint Stephen’s, Anselm succeeded him in the office of prior.[1027]

[Sidenote: Stories of him as prior.]

[Sidenote: Elected Abbot. 1078.]

This first preferment Anselm seems to have taken willingly. A crowd of beautiful stories, setting forth his faith towards God and his kindliness towards all men, belong to this part of his career, the time when he was specially employed in writing his theological works. We admire the mixture of wisdom and kindness with which he reproved the abbot of another house who complained that the boys who were entrusted to his teaching got more and more unruly, even though they were whipped day and night.[1028] We are tempted to feel a slight grudge when he counsels a knight who seems to have been leading a good and devout life in the world to embrace the monastic calling.[1029] Much as that age needed men like Anselm, it still more needed men like Gulbert of Hugleville and Helias of La Flèche. But we note with some interest the comment of Eadmer, so curiously illustrating the common rivalry between one monastery and another. In such cases Anselm did not counsel profession at Bec rather than in any other house, and this particular convert took the cowl at Marmoutiers. At last, on the death of Herlwin, the unanimous choice of the convent called him to the place of abbot. His deep reluctance to accept so great a charge was overcome only by the express command of Archbishop Maurilius, who, on his election to the priorship, had bidden him by virtue of holy obedience to accept both that and any higher preferment which might come in his way.[1030] The election of Anselm to the abbacy marks a stage in our story. It was in his character of abbot that he was first brought into relations with England; in that character he paid his first visit to the land which was presently to make him her own.

[Sidenote: Bec under Anselm.]

[Sidenote: His widespread fame.]

[Sidenote: His correspondence.]

[Sidenote: Intercourse between Bec and England.]

The fame of the new Abbot of Bec and of his house, great already, now grew still greater. Learning had shone at Bec ever since Lanfranc came thither; but hitherto it had shone only in the second rank. It now took the chief seat in the person of Abbot Anselm. He was sought by men from all parts as a friend, a teacher, a spiritual adviser. Of the open-handed hospitality of Bec it was not, we are told, for Norman neighbours to speak; those might speak who had found their way thither from the distant lands of Burgundy and Spain.[1031] The whole Latin world drank in with eagerness the teaching of Anselm.[1032] Scholars of all lands came to sit at his feet. Noble ladies in their widowhood sought his neighbourhood and spiritual direction, and received the honourable title of mothers of the house.[1033] Like all the saints and scholars of his day, he had a crowd of correspondents of all classes; amongst them we see Countess Ida of Boulogne and the Conqueror’s renowned daughter Adela.[1034] And throughout his life and letters we see constant signs of the daily intercourse which, as naturally followed on the circumstances of the time, was ever going on between Normandy and England. The endless going to and fro between the two countries strikes us at every step.[1035] There was an interchange of men; if many Normans found their way to England, some Englishmen found their way to Normandy. Bec had already begun to give bishops to England. Lanfranc had placed two monks of his old house in the episcopal chair of Rochester.[1036] The second of them, the famous Gundulf, had been, when at Bec, the familiar friend of Anselm, who spoke little himself, but who listened to the great teacher, and wept at his touching words.[1037] On the other hand, in the house of Bec itself there were monks who were English of the Old-English stock, monks whom Lanfranc thought fit to call back to their own land and to the monastery of which he was the spiritual father.[1038]

[Sidenote: Lands of Bec in England.]

[Sidenote: The dependent priory of Clare. 1090.]

Anselm had thus many ties of friendship and kindly association with England, even before he had any official connexion with the land or its inhabitants. And a strictly official connexion began long before he became archbishop. The Abbot of Bec had both temporal possessions and spiritual duties within our island. He was the lord of English estates and the spiritual father of brethren settled on English soil. The house of Bec appears in four places in Domesday as holder of lands in England; but one manor only was held in chief of the king. The church of Saint Mary of Bec held the lordship of Deverel in Wiltshire, once the possession of Brihtric, whether the son of Ælfgar or any less famous bearer of the name. This had been the gift of Queen Matilda, and it is worth noting that the value of the land had lessened in the few years between her death and the taking of the Survey.[1039] A smaller estate at Swinecombe in Oxfordshire, held of Miles Crispin, was more lucky; it had grown in value by one third.[1040] In Surrey the house held lands at Tooting and Streatham, the gift of Richard of Clare or of Tunbridge, him of whom we have so often heard. The possessions of Bec at Tooting, which had sunk to one fifth of their ancient value at the time of their grant to the abbey, had risen again to the value at which they were rated in the days of King Eadward.[1041] The business arising out of these lands, all seemingly held in demesne, with a mill, churls, slaves, and other dependents, must have called for some care on the part of the abbot or of those whom he employed for the purpose. And it would seem that, on the whole, the monastic body had been a careful husband of its English estates. In after times also Bec became the head of several alien priories in England; but one only of these can be carried back with certainty to Anselm’s day. This was the priory of Clare in Suffolk, afterwards moved to Stoke, which was founded as a cell to Bec while Anselm was abbot.[1042] It was the gift of Gilbert of Clare, brother of Richard the other benefactor of the house, a house which seems to have had special attractions for the whole family of Count Gilbert.

[Sidenote: Law-suits.]

[Sidenote: Anselm’s desire to do justice.]

[Sidenote: His first visit to England. 1078.]

[Sidenote: His friendship with the monks of Christ Church.]

[Sidenote: Eadmer.]

Anselm was thus a land-owner on both sides of the sea, and, little as he loved temporal business, he could not wholly escape it. No man, no society of men, in either the Normandy or the England of those days, could hope to keep clear of law-suits. The house of Herlwin, new as it was and holy as it was, seems to have been entangled in not a few. Anselm’s chief wish was that in these disputes justice should be done to all concerned. There were among the monks of Bec, as among the monks of other houses, men who knew the law and who were skilful in legal pleadings. The Abbot had sometimes to charge them to make no unfair use of their skill, and not to strive to win any advantage for the house but such as was strictly just.[1043] Otherwise, as far as he could, he entrusted mere worldly affairs――the serving of tables――to others.[1044] Yet he could not avoid journeys beyond sea on behalf of the house. He was thus more than once compelled to visit England. He crossed the sea in the first year of his appointment as abbot. He came to Canterbury; he was received with mickle worship by Lanfranc and the monks of Christ Church.[1045] The first touch of English soil seems to have changed the Burgundian saint, the Norman abbot, into an Englishman and an English patriot. It was now that he made the memorable discourse in which he showed that English Ælfheah was a true martyr.[1046] The Abbot of Bec did not scorn to be admitted into the brotherhood of the monks of Christ Church, and to dwell with them as one of themselves.[1047] It was the time when Lanfranc was doing his work of reform among them,[1048] a work which was doubtless helped by the sojourn and counsel of Anselm. With the more learned among them he lived familiarly, putting and answering questions, both in profane and sacred lore.[1049] And among them he made one friend, English by blood and name, whose memory is for ever entwined with his own. It was now that Eadmer, then a young monk of the house, won his deep regard, and attached himself for ever to the master whose acts he was in after times to record.[1050]

[Sidenote: Anselm’s general popularity in England.]

[Sidenote: His preaching.]

[Sidenote: His love for England.]

[Sidenote: His alleged miracles.]

[Sidenote: His friendship with the Conqueror;]

[Sidenote: with Earl Hugh.]

[Sidenote: Hugh’s changes at Chester.]

But it was not only in the church which was one day to be his own, or among men of his own order only, that Anselm made friends in England. He made a kind of progress through the land, being welcomed everywhere, as well in the courts of nobles as in the houses of monks, nuns, and canons.[1051] Everywhere he scattered the good seed of his teaching, speaking to all according to their several callings, to men and women, married and unmarried, monks, clerks, laymen, making himself, as far as was lawful, all things to all men.[1052] Scholar and theologian as Anselm was, his teaching was specially popular; he did not affect the grand style, but dealt largely in parables and instances which were easy to be understood.[1053] The laity therefore flocked eagerly to hear him, and every man rejoiced who could win the privilege of personal speech with the new apostle.[1054] The men of that age, stained as many of them were with great crimes――perhaps all the more because their crimes were of a kind which they could not help feeling to be crimes――commonly kept enough of conscience and good feeling to admire in others the virtues which they failed to practise themselves. William Rufus himself had moments when goodness awed him. It was only a few exceptional monsters like the fiend of Bellême whom no such feelings ever touched. Anselm became the idol of all the inhabitants of England, without distinction of age or sex, of rank or race. The land became to him yet another home, a home which he loved to visit, and where he was ever welcome.[1055] Men sought to him for the cure of bodily as well as spiritual diseases; and we read of not a few cases of healing in which he was deemed to be the agent, cases in which modern times will most likely see the strong exercise of that power which, from one point of view, is called imagination, and from another faith.[1056] The highest in estate and power were the most eager of all to humble themselves before him. We have seen how the elder William, ever mild to good men, was specially mild to Anselm, how he craved his presence on his death-bed, and how Anselm, unable to help his master in life, was among those who did the last honours to him in death.[1057] We are told that there was not an earl or countess or great person of any kind in England, who did not seek the friendship of Anselm, who did not deem that his or her spiritual state was the worse if any opportunity had been lost of doing honour or service to the Abbot of Bec.[1058] Like some other saints of his own and of other times, he drew to himself the special regard of some whose characters were most unlike his own. Earl Hugh of Chester, debauched, greedy, reckless, and cruel, beyond the average of the time, is recorded as being a special friend of the holy man.[1059] He who rebuked kings doubtless rebuked earls also; but it would have been a better sign of reformation, if Hugh, under the teaching of Anselm, had learned to spare the eyes either of brother nobles or of British 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.

[Sidenote: Feeling as to the vacancy of the archbishopric. 1092.]

[Sidenote: Vacancy of Lincoln.]

[Sidenote: 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.[1060] That such was the general feeling in England soon became known out of England; it became known at Bec as at other places; it was not hidden from the Abbot of Bec himself.

[Sidenote: Earl Hugh seeks help from Anselm in his reforms. 1092.]

[Sidenote: Anselm refuses to go.]

[Sidenote: His motives.]

[Sidenote: Hugh’s sickness and second message.]

[Sidenote: The third message.]

At the time which we have now reached Earl Hugh was planning his supposed reforms at Saint Werburh’s. Designing to fill the minster with monks, he would have his monks from the place where the monastic life was most perfectly practised; the men who were to kindle a new light at Chester must come from Bec.[1061] It was in the end from Bec that the first abbot Richard and his brethren came to wage that strife which we are told was so specially hard-fought in that region.[1062] But the founder further wished the work to be done under the eye of the Abbot of Bec himself; so, trusting in his old friendship, Earl Hugh prayed Anselm to come to him. His prayer was backed by that of other nobles of England;[1063] the monks of Bec too deemed that either the affairs of Saint Werburh’s or some other business of the monastery called for their abbot’s presence in England.[1064] But Anselm at first steadily refused to go; the general rumour had reached his own ears; he had been told that, if he went to England, he would certainly become Archbishop of Canterbury. He shrank from the acceptance of such an office; he shrank yet more from doing anything which might even have the look of seeking for such an office. It might be a question of casuistry whether the command of Maurilius to accept any preferment that might be offered could have any force beyond the life and the province of Maurilius; yet that command may have made Anselm yet more determined to keep out of the way of all danger of having the see of Canterbury offered to him. He refused to go to England, when it was possible that his object in going might be cruelly misconstrued.[1065] Another message came, announcing that Earl Hugh was smitten with grievous sickness, and needed the spiritual help of his friend. Moreover Anselm need not be afraid; there was nothing in the rumours which he had heard; he stood in no danger of the archbishopric.[1066] In this Hugh most likely spoke the truth. Others had brought themselves to believe that there must soon be an archbishop, and that that archbishop must be Anselm. But they had no ground for thinking that anything of the kind would happen, except that it was the best thing that could happen. The Earl of Chester was as likely as any man except Flambard to know the King’s real mind; and what followed makes it plain that as yet Rufus had no thought of filling the archbishopric at all. Still Anselm would not go till a third message from the Earl appealed to another motive. It would not be for the soul’s health of Anselm himself if he stayed away when his friend so deeply needed his help.[1067] To this argument Anselm yielded; for the sake of friendship and of his friend’s spiritual welfare, he would go, let men say what they would about his motives for going.[1068]

[Sidenote: He is bidden to go by his monks.]

[Sidenote: Anselm goes to England.]

But the invitation of Earl Hugh was not Anselm’s only motive for his journey. Another cause was added which a little startles us. The business of the abbey in England, business to be done with the King, still called for the abbot’s presence there. The monks sought to have the royal exactions on their English lands made less heavy.[1069] At this moment Anselm was not at Bec; he was spending some days at Boulogne with his friend and correspondent Countess Ida.[1070] While there, he received a message from Bec, bidding him, by virtue of the law of obedience, not to come back to the abbey till he had gone into England and looked after the matters about which he was needed there.[1071] Such a message as this from monks to their abbot sounds to us like a reversal of all monastic order; but it seems to have been held that, while each monk undoubtedly owed obedience to the abbot, the abbot himself owed obedience to the general vote of the convent. To these two influences, the law of obedience and care for Earl Hugh’s soul, Anselm at last yielded. He set sail from Boulogne or Whitsand, and landed at Dover. He was now within what was presently to be his own province, his own diocese; and that province he was not again to leave till he sought shelter on the mainland in the character of archbishop and confessor.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Anselm at Canterbury. September 8, 1092.]

[Sidenote: His first interview with Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Anselm’s rebuke of the King.]

[Sidenote: Settlement of the affairs of Bec.]