The King turns again to the lay lords. His words were reported to the King.[1388] We are again admitted to witness the scene in the presence-chamber. The bishops had proved broken reeds; William would make one more appeal to the lay nobles. “Everything that he says,” began the King, “is against my pleasure, and no one shall be my man who chooses to be his.[1389] Wherefore, you who are the great men of my kingdom, do you, as the bishops have done, withdraw from him all faith and friendship, that he may know how little he gains by the faith which he keeps to the Apostolic See in defiance of my will.” But the lay lords were not like the bishops; one would like to know by what mouth they made their calm and logical answer. They drew a clear distinction between spiritual and temporal allegiance. The King had told them that no one could be his man and the Archbishop’s at once, and he had bidden them to withdraw their faith—​clearly using the word in the feudal sense—​from the Archbishop. The lay lords support Anselm. They answered that they were not the Archbishop’s men, that they could not withdraw from him a fealty which they had never paid to him. This of course was true of the lay nobles as a body, whatever questions there might be about Tunbridge castle or any other particular fief. But they went on to say that, though Anselm was not their lord, yet he was their archbishop, that it was he who had to “govern Christianity” in the land; that, as Christian men, they could not, while in that land, decline his mastership, all the more as there was no spot of offence in him which should make the King treat him in any other way.[1390] The King’s difficulties. Such an answer naturally stirred up William’s wrath; but the earls and great barons of his kingdom were a body with whom even he could not dare to trifle. He was stronger than any one among them; he might not be stronger than all of them together, backed as they now were, as the events of the day before had shown, by popular feeling. He had once beaten the Norman nobles at the head of the English people; he might not be able to beat the Norman nobles and the English people together. He therefore made an effort, and kept down any open outburst of the wrath that was in him.[1391] But the bishops were covered with confusion;Shame of the bishops. they felt that all eyes were turned on them, and that their apostasy was loathed of all.[1392] This and that bishop was greeted, seemingly by this or that earl or baron, with the names usual in such cases, Judas, Pilate, and Herod.[1393] The King further examines the bishops. Then the King put the trembling bishops through another examination. Had they abjured all obedience to Anselm, or only such obedience as he claimed by the authority of the Roman Pontiff?[1394] The question was hard to answer. Anselm does not seem to have claimed any obedience by virtue of the authority of the Pope; he had simply refused to withdraw his own obedience from the Pope. Some therefore answered one way, some another. But it was soon plain which way the King wished them to answer. The real question in William’s mind had nothing to do with the Pope; any subtlety about acknowledging this or that Pope was a mere excuse. It was Anselm himself, as the servant of God, the man who spake of righteousness and temperance and judgement to come, that Rufus loathed and sought to crush. Those bishops therefore who said that they had abjured Anselm’s obedience utterly and without condition were at once bidden to sit down as his friends in seats of honour.[1395] His treatment of them. Those who said that they had abjured only such obedience as was claimed by the Pope’s authority, were sent, like naughty children, into a corner of the room, to wait, as traitors and enemies, for their sentence of condemnation.[1396] But they debated among themselves in their corner, and soon found the means of winning back the royal favour. A heavy bribe, paid at once or soon after, wiped out even the crime of drawing distinctions while withdrawing their obedience from a metropolitan whom the King hated.[1397]

Anselm wishes to leave England. While his suffragans were undergoing this singular experience of the strength of the secular arm, Anselm sent a message to the King. He now asked that, as all protection within the kingdom was withdrawn from him, the King would give him and his companions a safe-conduct to one of his havens, that he might go out of the realm till such a time as God might be pleased to put an end to the present distress.[1398] Perplexity of the King. The King was much troubled and perplexed. He wished of all things for Anselm to leave the kingdom; but he feared the greater scandal which would arise if he left the kingdom while still in possession of the archbishopric, while he saw no way of depriving him of it.[1399] He again took counsel; but this time he did not trouble the bishops for their advice. Of them he had had enough; it was their counsel which had brought him into his present strait.[1400] He once more turned to the lay lords. Another adjournment. They advised yet another adjournment. The Archbishop should go back to his own quarters in the King’s full peace,[1401] and should come again in the morning to hear the King’s answer to his petition. Many of the King’s immediate courtiers were troubled; they groaned at the thought of Anselm’s leaving the land.[1402] But he himself went gladly and cheerfully to his lodgings, hoping to cross the sea and to cast off all his troubles and all the burthens of the world.[1403]

Wednesday, March 14, 1095.
Anselm summoned to the King’s presence. The fourth day of the meeting came, and the way in which its business opened marks how the tide was turning in Anselm’s favour. A body of the nobles came straight from the King, asking the Primate to come to the royal presence.[1404] Anselm was tossed to and fro between the hope of leaving the kingdom and the fear of staying in it. Eadmer was eager to know what would be the end of the whole matter.[1405] They set forth and reached the castle. They were not however, at first at least, admitted to the presence-chamber, but sat in their wonted place. Before long the lay nobles, accompanied by some of the bishops, came to Anselm. They were grieved, they said, as old friends of his, that there had been any dispute between him and the King. The lay lords propose a “truce.” Their object was to heal the breach, and they held that the best means towards that object was to agree to an adjournment—​a truce, a peace[1406]—​till a fixed day, during which time both sides should agree to do nothing which could be counted as a breach of the peace. Anselm agreed, though he said that he knew what kind of peace it would be.[1407] But it should not be said of him that he preferred his own judgement to that of others. To all that his lord the King and they might appoint in the name of God he would agree,[1408] saving only his obedience to Pope Urban. Adjournment till May 20. The lords approved; the King agreed; he pledged his honour to the observance of the peace till the appointed day, the octave of Pentecost. The day seems to have been chosen in order that the other business of the Whitsun Gemót might be got over before the particular case of Anselm came on. If matters had not been brought to an agreement before that time, the case was to begin again exactly at the stage in which it had left off at Rockingham.[1409] It is not clear whether, even at this last moment, William and Anselm again met face to face. But the Archbishop, by the King’s leave, went to Canterbury, knowing that the truce was but an idle and momentary veiling of hatred and of oppression that was to come.[1410]

Importance of the meeting at Rockingham. So it soon proved; yet the scene at Rockingham was a victory, not only for a moment but for ever. No slight step had been taken in the great march of English freedom, when Anselm, whom the King had sought to condemn without trial or indictment, went back, with his own immediate case indeed unsolved, but free, uncondemned, untried, with the voice of the people loud in his favour, while the barons of the realm declared him free from every crime. It was no mean day in English history when a king, a Norman king, the proudest and fiercest of Norman kings, was taught that there were limits to his will. It is like a foreshadowing of brighter days to come when the Primate of all England, backed by the barons and people of England—​for on that day the very strangers and conquerors deserved that name—​overcame the Red King and his time-serving bishops. The day of Rockingham has the fullest right to be marked with white in the kalendar in which we enter the day of Runnymede and the day of Lewes.

The honour of the chivalrous King was pledged to the peace with Anselm. But the honour of the chivalrous King was construed after a truly chivalrous fashion. William keeps faith to Anselm personally. William doubtless thought that he was doing all that a true knight could be expected to do, if he kept himself from any personal injury to the man to whom he had personally pledged his faith. Anselm was unhurt; he was free; he went whither he would; he discharged the ordinary duties of his office undisturbed; it does not appear that he was in any way personally molested, or that any of the property of his see was taken into the King’s hands. But William knew full well how to wreak his malice upon Anselm without breaking the letter of the faith which he had pledged. He knew how to grieve Anselm’s loving heart far more deeply than it could be grieved by any wrong done to himself. He oppresses his friends. The honour of the good knight was pledged to Anselm personally; it was not pledged to Anselm’s friends and tenants. Towards them he might, without breach of honour, play the greedy and merciless king. A few days after Anselm had reached Canterbury, Rufus sent to drive out of England the Archbishop’s cherished friend and counsellor the monk Baldwin of Tournay,[1411] and two of his clerks. Their only crime was standing by their master in the trial which still stood adjourned.[1412] The Archbishop’s chamberlain was seized in his master’s chamber before his master’s eyes; false charges were brought against his tenants, unjust imposts were laid upon them, and other wrongs of many kinds done to them.[1413] The church of Canterbury, it was said, began to doubt whether it had not been better off during the vacancy than now that the archbishopric was full.[1414] And all this while, heavy as William professed to deem the crime of so much as giving Urban the title of Pope, William’s own dealings with Urban were neither slight nor unfriendly.

§ 5. The Mission of Cardinal Walter.
1095.

Events of the months of truce, March-May, 1095. The months of truce between the King and the Archbishop were, as our next chapter will show, busy months in other ways. William Rufus was all this time engaged in another dispute with a subject of a rank but little below that of the Primate, a dispute in which, at least in its early stages, the King appears to much greater advantage than he commonly does. A conspiracy against William’s throne and life was plotting; Robert of Mowbray was making ready for revolt, and his refusal to appear, when summoned, at the Easter and Whitsun assemblies of this year was the first overt act of his rebellion. Assemblies of the year. We may conceive that Anselm did not attend either of those gatherings; that of Whitsuntide we know that he did not. It might be more consistent with the notion of the truce that he should keep away from the King’s presence and court till the time which had been fixed for the controversy formally to begin again. At Easter and for some time after, Anselm seems to have stayed at Canterbury, and, while he was there, the metropolitan city received an unexpected visitor, who did not allow himself to be treated as a guest.

Position of Urban. The year which we have reached was one of the most memorable in the history of the papacy. Urban, though not in full possession of Rome, had kept his Christmas there a year before, and his cause was decidedly in the ascendant throughout the year of the Red King’s second Norman campaign.[1415] At the beginning of the next year, after keeping Christmas in Tuscany, Urban went on into Lombardy, where the Emperor still was, though his rebel son Conrad, crowned and largely acknowledged as King of Italy, was far more powerful than his father.[1416] Council of Piacenza. May 1–7. Almost on the same days as those which in England were given to the council of Rockingham, Urban held his great council of Piacenza, a council so great that no building could hold its numbers; the business of the assembly was therefore done, as we have seen it done in our own land, in the open fields.[1417] Its decrees. There the Empress Praxedes told her tale of sorrow and shame; there the cry of Eastern Christendom, set forth in the letters of the Emperor Alexios, was heard and heeded; there the heresy of Berengar, already smitten by Lanfranc,[1418] was again condemned; there a new set of anathemas were hurled at the married clergy,[1419] and a more righteous curse was denounced against the adulterous King of the French. No mention of English affairs. But no mention seems to have been made of English affairs; one is a little surprized at the small amount of heed which the dispute between the King and the Archbishop seems to have drawn to itself in foreign lands. Yet, next to the ups and downs of the Emperor himself, one would have thought that no change could have so deeply affected the Roman see as the change from William the Great to William the Red. It is part of the same general difficulty which attaches to the Red King’s career, the strange fact that the worst of all crowned sinners, the foulest in life, the most open in blasphemy, the most utter scorner of the ecclesiastical power, never felt the weight of any of those ecclesiastical censures which so often lighted on offenders of a less deep dye. But if Urban was not thinking about William, William was certainly thinking about Urban. It was at this stage that we light on the curious picture which we have before seen, showing us England in a state of uncertainty, and seemingly of indifference, between the rival Pontiffs.[1420] William’s fresh schemes to turn the Pope against Anselm. But just now it suited William to acknowledge some Pope, because he thought that his only chance of carrying out his purposes against Anselm was by the help of a Pope. He had found that no class of men in his kingdom, except perhaps some of the bishops, would support him in any attempt to deprive the Primate of his own arbitrary will. Mere violence of course was open to him; but his Witan would not agree to any step against Anselm which made any pretence to legal form, and, with public feeling so strongly on Anselm’s side, with a dangerous rebellion brewing in the realm, the King might well shrink from mere violence towards the first of his subjects. His new device was to acknowledge a Pope, and then to try, by his usual arts, arts which Rome commonly appreciated, to get the Pope whom he acknowledged to act against the Archbishop. To see Anselm deprived, or in any way humbled, by an exercise of ecclesiastical power, would be to wound Anselm in a much tenderer point, and would therefore be a much keener satisfaction to his own spite, than anything that he could himself do with the high hand.

Mission of Gerard and William of Warelwast. As soon therefore as William found, by the issue of the meeting at Rockingham, that Anselm could not be bent to his will, and that he could practically do nothing against Anselm, he sent two trusty clerks of his chapel and chancery on a secret and delicate errand. They were men of the usual stamp, both of whom afterwards rose to those high places of the Church which were just then commonly reserved for men of their stamp. They were Gerard, afterwards Bishop of Hereford and Archbishop of York, and William of Warelwast, afterwards Bishop of Exeter. Their commission. As we read our account of their commission, it would almost seem as if they were empowered to go to Rome, to examine into the state of things, and to acknowledge whichever seemed to be the true Pope, or rather whichever Pope was most likely to suit their master’s purpose. They are practically sent to acknowledge Urban. But practically they had no choice but to acknowledge Urban. Local English feeling might indeed set little store by one who simply “hight Pope, though he nothing had of the settle at Rome;”[1421] but Urban was plainly the stronger Pope, the Pope acknowledged by all who were not in the immediate interest of the Emperor. And, what was more, Urban was the only Pope who could carry out William’s purpose. A censure from Urban would be a real blow to Anselm and to Anselm’s partisans; a censure from Clement would in their eyes go for nothing, or rather it would be reckoned as another witness in their favour. Practically Gerard and William of Warelwast went to acknowledge Urban, and to see what they could make of him. They went secretly. Anselm knew nothing of their going. Most likely nothing was known of their errand by any man beyond the innermost cabal of the King’s special counsellors.[1422]

Their mission is said to have been to Rome; but the name Rome must be taken in a conventional sense for any place where the Pope might be. It is not likely that they really reached the Eternal City. Urban at Cremona. April 10, 1095. In the former part of April Urban was at Cremona, and was received there with great state by the rebel King Conrad.[1423] The momentary effort of Henry which followed, his vain attempt on Nogara, only raised the position of Urban and the Great Countess yet higher.[1424] Dealings of Gerard and William with Urban.It was most likely at Cremona that the ministers from England met Urban. They were to try, if possible, to win over the Pontiff, by gifts, by promises, by any means, to send a pallium to England for the King to bestow on the Archbishop of Canterbury, without mentioning the name of Anselm. The Sicilian “Monarchy.” They were, it seems, to try to obtain for the King a legatine authority like that which, then or later, had been granted to the Norman princes of Sicily.[1425] A Norman king of England was surely as worthy of such powers as a Norman Great Count of Sicily; and throughout these disputes we ever and anon see the vision of the “Sicilian Monarchy,” as something at which kings of England were aiming, and which strict churchmen condemned, whether in Sicily or in England.[1426] It is even possible that Gerard and William of Warelwast may have discussed the matter with some members of the Sicilian embassy which about this time brought the daughter of Count Roger to Pisa as the bride of King Conrad.[1427] Relations between England and Sicily. Close intercourse between the Norman princes of the great Oceanic and the great Mediterranean island is now beginning to be no small element in European politics. Some commission of this kind from the Pope was what William’s heart was set upon; he thought he had good right to it; he thought that his hope of it could not be doomed to disappointment.[1428] Did the proudest of men look forward, as an addition to royal and imperial power, to a day when he might fill a throne in the mother church of England, looking down on the patriarchal chair, as the empty thrones of later Williams still look down on the lowlier metropolitan seats of Palermo and Monreale?

Gerard and William come back, The dates show that the journeys must have been hasty, and that the business was got through with all speed. The two clerks could not have left England before the middle of March, and May was not far advanced before they were in England again, and a papal Legate with them. and bring Cardinal Walter as Legate. This was the Cardinal Walter, Bishop of Albano, whose good life is witnessed by our own Chronicler.[1429] His Italian subtlety showed itself quite equal to the work of outwitting the King and his counsellors whenever he chose; but his Roman greediness could not always withstand their bribes. He brings a pallium. He came, bringing with him a pallium, but the whole affair was, by the King’s orders, shrouded in the deepest mystery. Not a word was said about the pallium; indeed the Legate was not allowed to have any private discourse with any man. Secrecy of his errand. His two keepers, Gerard and William, watched him carefully; they passed in silence through Canterbury, and took care not to meet the Archbishop.[1430] His interview with the King. A few days before Whitsuntide, Cardinal Walter had an interview with the King. He spoke so that William understood him to be willing to abet all his purposes. Some special privilege was granted to William, which amounted at the least to this, that no legate should be sent into England but one of the King’s own choosing.[1431] Not a word did Cardinal Walter say on behalf of Anselm, not a word that could make peace between him and the King, not a word that could give Anselm any comfort among all the troubles that he was enduring on behalf of the Christian religion and of the authority of the Holy See.[1432] Many who had looked for great good from the Legate’s coming began to murmur, and to say, as Englishmen had learned to say already and as they had often to say again, that at Rome gold went for more than righteousness.[1433] To King William everything seemed to be going as he wished it to go. William acknowledges Urban. Fully satisfied, he put out a proclamation that throughout his Empire—​through the whole patriarchate of Anselm—​Urban should be acknowledged as Pope and that obedience should be yielded to him as the successor of Saint Peter.[1434] Walter had now gained his point; William fancied that he had gained his. He at once asked that Anselm might be deprived of his archbishopric by the authority of the Pope whom he had just acknowledged. He offered a vast yearly payment to the Roman See, if the Cardinal would only serve his turn in this matter.[1435] Walter refuses to depose Anselm. But Walter stood firm; he had done the work for which he had come; England was under the obedience of Urban. And, much as gold might count for at Rome, neither the Pope nor his Legate had sunk to the infamy of taking money to oppress an innocent man and a faithful adherent. Anselm was indeed treated by them as Englishmen, whether by race, by birth, or by adoption, whether Edmund, Thomas, or Anselm, commonly were treated by Popes. He was made a tool of, and he got no effectual support; but Urban was not prepared for such active wickedness as the Red King asked of him.

William and his counsellors outwitted by the Legate. William was now thoroughly beaten at his own weapons. The craft and subtlety of Randolf Flambard, of William of Saint-Calais, of the Achitophel of Meulan himself, had proved of no strength before the sharper wit of Walter of Albano. The King complained with good right that he had gained nothing by acknowledging Urban.[1436] In truth he had lost a great deal. He had lost every decent excuse for any further attack upon Anselm. The whole complaint against Anselm was that he had acknowledged Urban. But the King had now himself acknowledged Urban, and he could not go on persecuting Anselm for simply forestalling his own act. In legal technicality doubtless, if it was a crime to acknowledge Urban when the King had not yet acknowledged him, that crime was not purged by the King’s later acknowledgement of him. Rufus himself might have been shameless enough to press so pettifogging a point; but he had learned at Rockingham that no man in the land, save perhaps a few servile bishops, would support him in so doing. He is driven to a reconciliation with Anselm. There was nothing to be done but for William to make up his quarrel with Anselm, to make it up, that is, as far as appearances went, to make it up till another opportunity for a quarrel could be found. But till such opportunity was found, Anselm must be openly and formally received into the King’s favour.[1437] The thing had to be done; only if some money could be squeezed out of Anselm in the process of doing it, the chivalrous King would be the better pleased.

Whitsun Gemót at Windsor. May 13, 1095. The feast of Pentecost came, and with it the second of the assemblies at which the rebellious Earl of Northumberland refused to show himself. The King and his Witan were at Windsor; the Archbishop was keeping the feast at his manor of Mortlake. On the octave he was himself, according to the truce made at Rockingham, to appear at Windsor. The King’s message to Anselm. In the course of the Whitsun-week a message was brought to him from the King, bidding him go to Hayes, another of his manors nearer to Windsor, in order that messages might more easily go to and fro between him and the King.[1438] He went, and Eadmer went with him. The next day nearly all the bishops came to him; some of them, it will be remembered, had kept the King’s favour throughout, and the others who had lost it had bought it again. Their object was to try to persuade the Archbishop to give money to the King for the restoration of his favour. Anselm answered stoutly, as before, that he would not so dishonour his lord as to treat his friendship as something which could be bought and sold.[1439] He would faithfully discharge every temporal duty to his lord, on the one condition of being allowed to keep his obedience to Pope Urban. If that was not allowed, he would again ask for a safe-conduct to leave the kingdom. The Legate’s coming revealed to Anselm. They then told him—​the secret must have been still kept, though Urban was acknowledged—​that the Bishop of Albano had brought a pallium from the Pope; they did not scruple to add that he had, at the King’s request, brought it for Anselm.[1440] Would not the Archbishop pay something for so great a benefit?[1441] Would he not at least, now that the pallium had come to him instead of his going for the pallium, pay the sum which the journey to Rome would otherwise have cost him?[1442] Anselm will not pay for the pallium. Anselm would pay nothing. The King had thus to make the best of a bad bargain. As Anselm would not pay for either friendship or pallium, there was nothing to be done but to let him have both friendship and pallium without paying. Anselm and William reconciled. The King once more consulted his lay nobles, and, by their advice,[1443] he restored Anselm to his full favour, he cancelled all former causes of quarrel, he received him as archbishop and ghostly father, and gave him the fullest licence to exercise his office throughout the realm. One condition only seems to have been made; Anselm was to promise that he would observe the laws and customs of the realm and would defend them against all men.[1444] The promise was made, but with the express or implied reservation of duty to God.[1445] That was indeed the reservation which William most hated; but in his present frame of mind he may have brought himself to consent to it. Anselm came to Windsor, and was admitted by Their friendly discourse. the King to his most familiar converse in the sight of the lords and of the whole multitude that had come together.[1446] Cardinal Walter came in at the lucky moment, and was edified by the sight. He quoted the scripture, “Behold, how good and joyful it is brethren to dwell together in unity.” He sat down beside the friendly pair; he quoted other scriptures, and expressed his sorrow that he himself had not had any hand in the good work of bringing them together.

The wild bull and the feeble sheep thus seemed for a moment to pull together as friendly yokefellows. But a Norman king did not, in his character of wild bull, any more than in his character of lion, altogether cast aside his other character of fox. He, or Count Robert for him, had one shift left. Or it might almost seem that it was not the King’s own shift, but merely the device of flatterers who wished to win the royal favour by proposing it. Anselm asked to take the pallium from the King. Would not the Archbishop, for the honour of the King’s majesty, take the pallium from the King’s hand?[1447] Anselm had made no objection to receiving the staff from the King’s hand, for such was the ancient custom of England. But with the pallium the King had nothing to do; it belonged wholly to the authority of Saint Peter and his successor.[1448] He refuses. Anselm therefore refused to take the pallium from the King. The refusal was so clearly according to all precedent, the proposal the other way was such a manifest novelty, that nothing more was said about the matter. It was settled that, on a fixed day, the pallium should be laid on the altar of Christ in the metropolitan church, and that Anselm should take it thence, as from the hand of Saint Peter himself.[1449] The expression used is remarkable, as showing that the popular character of these assemblies had not utterly died out. Assent of the Assembly. “The whole multitude agreed.”[1450] They agreed most likely by a shout of Yea, Yea, rather than by any more formal vote; but in any case it was that voice of the people which Eadmer at least knew to be the voice of God.

Anselm absolves two repentant bishops. The Archbishop and his faithful comrade now set out for Canterbury. But he was called on to do some archiepiscopal acts by the way. They had hardly left Windsor when two bishops came to express their repentance for the crime of denying their metropolitan at Rockingham.[1451] Robert and Osmund. These were the ritualist Osmund of Salisbury, and Robert of Hereford, the friend of Wulfstan. It was believed that, besides the visit at the moment of his departure, the saint of Worcester had again appeared to Bishop Robert. He had warned him of divers faults in his life and in the administration of his diocese, giving him however good hopes if he mended his ways.[1452] Notwithstanding this voice from the dead, Robert had consented to the counsel and deed of them at Rockingham; he now came with Osmund to ask pardon. Anselm turned into a little church by the wayside, and gave them absolution. Then and there too he did another act of archiepiscopal clemency to a more distant suffragan. Wilfrith of Saint David’s restored. Wilfrith Bishop of Saint David’s had been—​we are not told when—​suspended for some fault—​we are not told what. Anselm now restored him to his episcopal office.[1453]

Anselm receives the pallium at Canterbury. June 10, 1095. The Archbishop went on to Canterbury, and there awaited the coming of the Roman Cardinal. On the appointed day, a Sunday in June, Bishop Walter came. He was met with all worship by the convents of the two monasteries, Christ Church and Saint Augustine’s, by a great body of clergy, and by a vast crowd of layfolk of both sexes. The Bishop of Albano bore the precious gift in a silver casket. As they drew near to Christ Church, Anselm, with bare feet, but in the full dress of his office, supported on either side by the suffragans who had come to the ceremony, met the procession. The pallium was laid on the altar; it was taken thence by the hand of Anselm, and reverently kissed by those who were near him.[1454] The Archbishop was then clothed with his new badge of honour; nothing was now wanting to his position. Already invested, consecrated, clothed with full temporal and spiritual powers within his own province by the King and the bishops of England, he now received the solemn recognition of the rest of the Western Church, in the person of its chief Pontiff.[1455] Anselm and England were again in full fellowship with the lawful occupier of the apostolic throne. Nothing now was wanting. The Archbishop, clad in his pallium, sang the mass. But, as at his consecration, men found an evil omen in part of the words of the service. The gospel of the day told of the man who made a great supper and bade many, but whose unthankful guests began to make excuse.[1456]

The reception of the pallium by Anselm was the last great ceremony done in the metropolitan church during this his first primacy; it was one of the very few great ceremonies done in the unaltered church of Lanfranc. Death of Bishop Robert of Hereford. June 26, 1095.And, if we are to understand that all the suffragans of Canterbury were present, one of them was soon taken away. Not many days after Anselm first put on the pallium, his late penitent, Bishop Robert of Hereford, left the world, to join for ever, as the charity of Worcester believed, the saintly friend whom he had twice wonderfully seen.[1457] The Legate stays in England. Cardinal Walter meanwhile stayed in England during the greater part of that year, and according to some accounts for some months of the year which followed. Notwithstanding the good life for which the Chronicler gives him credit, he seems, like other Romans, to have been open to the King’s special means of influence, and a foreign writer who had good means of knowing seems to speak of his general conduct in England as having greatly tended to bring his office into discredit.[1458] His commission from Pope Urban was a large one. Objects of Walter’s mission. Among other things, he had to look to the better payment of the Romescot,[1459] which, it will be remembered, had not always flowed regularly into the papal coffers even in the days of the Conqueror,[1460] and which of course did not flow at all in the days when no Pope was acknowledged in England. He had also to enquire generally into the state of things in England, and to consult with Anselm as to the means of reform. His dealings with Anselm. It is plain however from most independent testimonies that the Archbishop and the Cardinal were by no means suited to work together. Two letters from Anselm to Walter throw a singular light on some points in the story which are not recorded in any narrative. The personal intercourse of the two prelates was interfered with by a cause which we should hardly have looked for, namely, the occupation of Anselm in the duties of a military command. But it is plain that Anselm did not look for much good from any special intercourse between himself and the Cardinal. He writes that private conferences between the two were of no use; they could do nothing without the King’s consent and help.[1461] But Anselm seems to have taken a more constitutional view of the way by which the King’s consent and help was to be got than the Roman Legate was likely to take. Anselm says that they would meet to no purpose, except when the King, the bishops, and the nobles, were all near to be referred to.[1462] This reads very much as if Anselm was aware of some underhand practices between the King and the Legate, and had no mind to meet the emissary of Rome except when he himself would have the constitutional voice of the nation to back him. But as things stood at the moment, circumstances seem to have hindered the meeting for which Walter seems to have wished and Anselm not to have wished.

The King’s northern march. We are now in the thick of the revolt of Earl Robert of Mowbray, the tale of which will be told in full in the next chapter. The King was on his march northward to put down the revolt. King, Archbishop, and Legate, had parted as if the Legate at least was not to see either of the other two again in England.[1463] At such a time the desired conference could not be held; and Anselm himself was bound for the time within a very narrow local range. Anselm entrusted with the defence of Canterbury. While the King marched on towards Northumberland, the Archbishop was entrusted with the care of Canterbury, perhaps of Kent generally, against an expected Norman invasion.[1464] If Anselm’s conscience would have allowed him to take part in actual warfare, we can hardly fancy that he would have proved a captain to the liking of the Red King. Yet it does sometimes happen that a simple sense of duty will carry a man with credit through business the most opposite to his own temper and habits. It is more likely however that the duty really laid upon Anselm, as upon Wulfstan at Worcester, was rather to keep the minds of the King’s forces up to the mark by stirring exhortations, while the task of personally fighting and personally commanding was given to others. Still he was, both by the King’s word of mouth and by his writ and seal, entrusted with the care of the district,[1465] and he deemed it his duty not to leave Canterbury, except to go to any point that might be immediately threatened.[1466] Why Walter could not have come to Canterbury is not clear. Letters between Anselm and Walter. Anyhow personal communication was hindered, and to that hindrance we owe a letter which gives us a further insight into the almost incredible shamelessness of the King’s courtly bishops. Walter, it is plain, had been rebuking them for their conduct towards Anselm. Position of the bishops. They were open to ecclesiastical censure for denying their archbishop, and he blames Anselm himself for too great lenity towards them.[1467] Anselm pleads that they had returned to him and had promised obedience for the future.[1468] The others, it would seem, had followed the example of the Bishops of Hereford and Salisbury. But it comes out in the letter that some of these undutiful suffragans had taken up the strangest and most self-condemning line of defence. These men, cringing slaves of the King, who had carried every mean and insulting message from the King to the Primate, who had laid down the rule that neither bishops nor other men had anything to do but to follow the King’s will in all things, The bishops object to Anselm’s position. were not ashamed to plead that Anselm was no lawful archbishop, that he could claim no duty from them, simply because he had done what they had themselves done in a far greater degree. These faithful servants of King William were not ashamed to urge that their master and his kingdom had been in a state of schism, cut off from the Catholic Church and its lawful head, and that Anselm had been a partaker in the schism. He had received investiture from a schismatic King; he had done homage to that schismatic King, and had received consecration from schismatic bishops. In other words, they plead that Anselm is no lawful archbishop, because he had been consecrated by themselves.

A more shameless plea than this could hardly be thought of, but Anselm does not seem stirred by its shamelessness. His answer. He simply answers the doubt which was cast on his own appointment and consecration as calmly as if it had been started by some impartial outsider.[1469] Those who consecrated him were not schismatics; no judgement had cut them off from the communion of the Church. They had not cast off their allegiance to the Roman Pontiff; they all professed obedience to the Roman See; they had not in any way denied that Urban was the lawful Pope; they had simply, in the midst of the controversy which was going on, doubted whether it was their clear duty to receive him as such.[1470] That his own position was perfectly good was shown by the conduct of the Pope himself. Urban knew all that had happened between him and the King, together with all the circumstances of his consecration. So knowing, he had treated him as lawfully consecrated, and had sent him the pallium by Walter’s own hands.[1471] If such objections had any force, why had not Walter spoken of them before he, Anselm, had received the pallium?[1472] Question about the monks of Christ Church. Another passage in this letter would seem to imply that some complaint had been made as to Anselm’s dealings with the monks of his own church. The Cardinal asks Anselm to leave them in free possession of their goods.[1473] Anselm answers that he earnestly desires the peace and advantage of his monks, and with God’s help he will do all that lies in his power to settle everything for their advantage.[1474] Anselm and his monks seem to have been commonly on the best of terms. Still we seem here to see the beginnings of those disputes which grew into such terrible storms a hundred years later. The lands of the monks had, as we have seen,[1476] not been spared during the vacancy of the archbishopric. And it may be that some wrong had been again done to them when the King was molesting the Archbishop’s men during the time of truce. We heard not long ago of great complaints going up during that time; some of them may have taken the formal shape of an appeal to the Cardinal. Anselm’s reeves may have been no more scrupulous than the reeves of other men. Indeed we find a curious witness that it was so. The question was raised why Anselm, a monk and a special lover of monks, did not always live at Canterbury, among his monks.[1475] Several answers are given. Anselm and his tenants. The most remarkable is that his presence in his manors was needed to protect his poorer tenants from the oppression of his reeves.[1476] When such care was needed on behalf of the tenants, it is quite possible that the reeves might sometimes meddle wrongfully with the possessions of the monks also.

A time of peace for Anselm followed, though hardly a time of peace for England. Before the year was out the King had put down the revolt in Northumberland; Earl Robert of Mowbray was his prisoner. An expedition against the Welsh was less successful, and Scotland still remained under the king of her own choice. Gemót of Windsor and Salisbury. Christmas, 1095–1096. The Christmas Gemót, of which we shall have presently to speak at length, was a famous, and, what was not usual in our early assemblies, a bloody gathering. It was held at Windsor and was then adjourned to Salisbury; at the former place at least Anselm was present, and he had an opportunity of showing Christian charity to an enemy. Anselm attends the Bishop of Durham on his death-bed. January, 1096. At Windsor Bishop William of Durham sickened and died. His latter days are so closely connected with the fall of Earl Robert that they will be better spoken of elsewhere. It is enough to say here that his last hours were cheered by the ghostly help of the holy man against whom he had so deeply sinned. Meanwhile Anselm, comforted by the recall of his friend Baldwin,[1477] was doing his duty in peace; ruling, writing, exhorting, showing love to every living creature,[1478] ever and anon called on to discharge the special duties of his office. Consecration of bishops. In this interval he consecrated two bishops to sees within the realm. The churches of Worcester and Hereford were vacant by the deaths of the two friends Wulfstan and Robert. Both sees were filled in the year after they fell vacant. Were they filled after the usual fashion of the Red King’s day, or was Anselm, now, outwardly at least, in William’s full favour, able during this interval of peace to bring about some relaxation of the crying evil of this reign? There is no direct statement either way; we can judge only by what we know of the characters of the two men appointed. Neither of them, one would think, was altogether to the mind of Anselm. Samson Bishop of Worcester. In the place of the holy Wulfstan, the diocese of Worcester received as its bishop, and the monks of Worcester received as their abbot, a canon of Bayeux, Samson by name, a brother of Archbishop Thomas of York. The influence of the Northern Primate may perhaps be seen in the appointment of his kinsman to a see so closely connected with his own. Samson was one of the school of learned men with whom Odo—​it was his one redeeming merit—​had filled his church of Bayeux.[1479] He was as yet only in deacon’s orders, and he was possibly married, at least he is said to have been the father of the second archbishop Thomas of York.[1480] He seems to have been one of those prelates, who, without any claim to special saintship, went through their course at least decently. He was bountiful to all; to the monks of Worcester he did no harm—​some harm seems to have been looked for from a secular—​beyond suppressing their dependent monastery of Westbury.[1481] Of the new Bishop of Hereford we know more. Gerard Bishop of Hereford, Archbishop of York 1100. He was that Gerard who had helped to bring Cardinal Walter to England, one of the King’s clerks, not even in deacon’s orders, and a thorough time-server.[1482] We cannot help suspecting that his bishopric was not granted for nothing, whatever may have been the case with Samson at Worcester. Consecration of Gerard and Samson. June 6, 1096. The bishops-elect came to Anselm for consecration. He was then with his friend Gundulf at Lambeth, then a manor of the see of Rochester. In the chapel of the manor Anselm ordained them priests.[1483] The next day he consecrated them in the cathedral church of London, with the help of four of his suffragans, three of whom, Thomas of York, Maurice of London, and Gundulf of Rochester, had in different ways a special interest in the ceremony. The fourth was Herbert, described as of Thetford or Norwich. It was in the course of this year that he began his great work in his last-named see.[1484]

Anselm consecrates Irish bishops. This year too Anselm was able to show that his style of Patriarch of all the nations beyond the sea was not an empty title. It was now that he consecrated two bishops to sees in Ireland, Samuel of Dublin and Malchus of Waterford. They were both Irish by birth, but monks of English monasteries, Samuel of Saint Alban’s, Malchus of Winchester. They came with letters from the clergy and people of their sees, and from King Murtagh or Murchard, of whom we shall hear again, and who takes to himself the sounding title of King of Ireland. Both were consecrated by Anselm, Samuel at Winchester, Malchus at Canterbury.[1485] It was no new claim; two predecessors of Samuel had already been consecrated by Lanfranc.

§ 6. The Crusade and the Mortgage of Normandy.
November, 1095-March, 1097.

We must now for a while again turn our eyes to Normandy, but to Normandy mainly as affected by the most stirring scenes in the history of the world. Council of Piacenza. March 7, 1095. We have seen Urban at Piacenza; we have heard him there make his appeal to Western Christendom on behalf of the oppressed churches and nations of the East. Their cry came up then, as it has come up in our own ears; and it was answered in those days as one only among Christian nations has been found to answer it in ours. In those days the bulwark and queen of the Eastern lands still Appeal of the Emperor Alexios. stood untouched. The New Rome had not then to be won back for Christendom; it had simply to be preserved. By the prince who still kept on the unbroken succession of Constantine and Diocletian and Augustus the appeal was made which stirred the hearts of nations Council of Clermont. November 18, 1095.as the heart of one man. The letters of Alexios had been read at Piacenza; the great call from the mouth of the Western Pontiff was made in the ears of a vaster multitude still in the memorable assembly of Clermont. The first Crusade. But the tale of the first Crusade needs not to be told here. The writers of the time were naturally called away from what might seem the smaller affairs of their own lands to tell of the great struggle of two worlds. Some of the fullest accounts of the gathering and march of the crusaders are to be found in the writings to which we are in the habit of turning in every page for the history of England and Normandy.[1486] Our native Chronicler can spare only a few words, but those are most pithy words, to set forth the great stirring of the nations.[1487] Bearing of the crusade on our story. And in our present tale the holy war directly comes home to us, chiefly because so many men whom we have already heard of took a part in it. Above all, it places two of our chief actors before us in parts eminently characteristic of the two. We see how Duke Robert of Normandy went forth to show himself among the foremost and the worthiest in the struggle, and how King William of England took occasion of his brother’s zeal to gain his duchy by money wrung from English households and English churches. I have noticed elsewhere,[1488] as has been often noticed before, that the work of the first crusade was strictly the work of the nations, and of princes of the second rank. No king engaged in the first crusade. Dukes and counts there were many in the crusading army, but no king of the West joined in its march. The Western Emperor was at open war with the Pope who preached the crusade. The kings of Spain had their own crusade to wage. The kings of England and France were of all men in their kingdoms the least likely to join in the enterprise.The crusades a Latin movement. The kingdoms of the North were as yet hardly stirred by the voice of Urban. It is indeed plain that the whole movement was primarily a Latin movement. It is with a true instinct that the people of the East have from those days onward Name of Franks. given the name of Franks to all the Christians of the West. It is a curious speculation, and one at which I have already hinted elsewhere, what would have been the share of England in the crusades, if there had been no Norman Conquest.[1489] As it was, the part of the Teutonic nations in the crusades is undoubtedly secondary to that of the Latin nations. Germany takes no leading part till a later stage; Scandinavia takes no leading part at all; England is brought into the scene as an appendage to Normandy. Share of Normandy and Flanders. The English crusaders served under the banner of the Norman Duke.[1490] Among the secondary powers Flanders indeed appears among the foremost; but Flanders, a fief of the crown of Paris, was, as a power, though not as a people, more Latin than Teutonic. The elder Count Robert had won the honour of forestalling the crusade by sending help to the Eastern Emperor on his own account.[1491] Place chosen for the council. It was fittingly in a Latin city, in a Gaulish city, that Urban, himself by birth a Frenchman in the stricter sense,[1492] called the nations of the West to arms. But it was equally fitting that it should not be within the immediate dominion of a king who had no heart for the enterprise, of a king whose own moral offences it was one of the duties of the Pontiff and his council to denounce. Not in the dominions of any king, not in the dominions of any of the great dukes and counts who were in power on a level with kings, but in the land of the lowlier counts, not as yet dauphins, of Auvergne, the assembly met whose acts were to lead to the winning back of the Holy City for Christendom, but with which we are more directly concerned as causing William the Red to reign at Rouen as well as at Winchester.

Decrees of the council. The preaching of the crusade was not the only business of the great assembly at Clermont. A crowd of canons of the usual kind were passed against the usual abuses. Those abuses were not confined to England and Normandy. We are told that in all the lands on our side of the Alps—​and we may venture to doubt whether things were likely to be much better on the other side—​simony prevailed among all classes of the clergy, while the laity had taken to put away their wives and to take to themselves the wives of other men.[1493] The great example of this last fault was certainly King Philip of France, whose marriage or pretended marriage with Bertrada of Montfort, the wife of Count Fulk of Anjou, was one of the subjects of discussion at the council. All abuses of all these kinds were again denounced, Lay investiture forbidden. as they had often been denounced before, and were often to be denounced again. But what concerns us more immediately is the decree that no bishop, abbot, or clerk of any rank, should receive any ecclesiastical benefice from the hand of any prince or other layman.[1494] This struck straight at the ancient use both of England and of Normandy. It forbad what Gregory the Seventh had, if not allowed, at least winked at, during his whole reign, in the case of the common sovereign of those two lands.[1495] This decree, we cannot doubt, had an important bearing on the future position of Anselm. Sentences against Clement and the Emperor; against Philip and Bertrada. Wibert, calling himself Clement, was of course excommunicated afresh, along with the Emperor as his supporter. So were the King of the French and his pretended queen, for their adulterous marriage. So were all who should call them King and Queen or Lord and Lady, or should so much as speak to either of them for any other purpose except to rebuke their offences.[1496] The thunders of the Church could have found only one more fitting object than the reformation of this great moral scandal. But we see to what a height ecclesiastical claims had grown, when the council took on itself to declare the offenders deprived of their royal dignity and their feudal rights. Then followed the great discourse which called men to the Holy War. Urban preaches the crusades; his geography. Urban told how, of the three parts of the world, the infidels had rent away two from Christendom; how Asia and Africa were theirs—​a saying wholly true of Africa, and which, when the Turk held Nikaia, seemed even more true of Asia than it really was. Europe alone was left, our little portion. Of that, Spain had been lost—​the Almoravids had come in since our last glimpse of Spanish matters[1497]—​while most of the northern parts of Europe itself were still shrouded in heathen darkness. It needs some little effort to remember how true to the letter Urban’s religious geography was. The south-western peninsula was then, what the south-eastern is now, the land of Christian nations slowly winning back their own from infidel masters. And, before Swedish kings had crossed the Baltic, before Sword-brothers and Teutonic knights had arisen, before Russia had made her way northward, southward, and eastward, all north-eastern Europe was still heathen, while Scandinavia, Poland, and Hungary, were still recent conquests for the faith. Into the central strip of Christian land which lay between the heathen of the north and the Turks and Saracens of the south, east, and west, the enemy was now ready to cross. Urban called on his hearers to go forth and stop the way; and not a few of the men whose names have been famous, some whose names have been infamous, in our own story were among the foremost to go forth on the holy errand to which the voice of the Pontiff called them.

French and other crusaders. Those among the recorded crusaders whose names come more immediately home to Englishmen did not join the holy war till a later time. But not a few names which have been long familiar to us are to be found in the list of those who joined in the first regular expedition 1096. which set forth in the course of the year which followed the assembly at Clermont. Hugh brother of King Philip. Beyond the bounds of England and Normandy we may mark the names of Hugh surnamed the Great, the brother of King Philip, Count of Vermandois, Count of Valois in succession to the holy Simon,[1498] but who appears in our chief list of crusaders by the lowlier title of the Count of Crêpy. He went to the work, leaving his fiefs to his sons. His daughter Isabel or Elizabeth he gave in marriage to Count Robert of Meulan, by this time no very youthful bridegroom.[1499] Robert of Meulan marries his daughter. Among princes of greater power, but of less lofty birth, the foreign allies of the Norman house were represented by the younger Count Robert of Flanders, nephew of the Conqueror’s queen, and by Stephen Count of Chartres and Blois, husband of Robert of Flanders and Stephen of Chartres. the Conqueror’s noblest child, and father of a king of England and of a bishop of an English see more personally eminent than his royal brother. Rotrou of Mortagne and Walter of Saint Valery went from the border lands so closely connected with Norman history. In Everard of Puiset we hear the name of a house which was in the next century to become famous in England on the throne of Saint Cuthberht, the throne at that moment empty and widowed by the death of William of Saint-Calais. The brothers from Boulogne; And from a house most hateful to England, but which had received no small share of the spoils of England, went forth three brethren, one of whom was to show himself the worthiest, and to be placed the highest, in the crusading host. Eustace, Eustace of Boulogne, a prince beyond the sea but in England lord of lands scattered from Mendip to the Kentish and East-Saxon shores,[1500] marched with his two brothers, both of whom were to reign as kings in the Holy City. Baldwin, The part of Baldwin in the enterprise had been already foreshadowed in visions told in the hall of Conches.[1501] Visions were hardly needed to foretell the Godfrey of Lorraine. greatness of Godfrey of Lorraine, who had won his duchy as the prize of faithful service to the Emperor, but who was none the less ready to discharge the duties of a higher allegiance at the bidding of the Pontiff. From Normandy itself went, among a crowd of others, some of that younger generation which is beginning to supply the chief actors in our tale. Norman crusaders. Philip, the son of the lately deceased Roger of Montgomery, Ivo and Alberic the sons of the lately deceased Hugh of Grantmesnil,[1502] all went forth; so did Gerard of Gournay and his wife Eadgyth, he to die, she to come back for another marriage.[1503] And with them went another married pair whose names carry us back to earlier times. Ralph of Wader. The double traitor, Ralph of Wader, traitor to England, traitor to William, went forth with his valiant Emma, to do something to wipe out his old crimes by good service beneath the walls of Nikaia, and to leave his bones and hers in lands where his memory was not a memory of shame.[1504]