The Norman Conquest (43 page)

We should put this into perspective by observing that the situation in 1072 was not as serious as it had been a generation earlier. After the Conquest of England William was the most feared warrior in Europe, while his adversaries were young men of little or no reputation. He was also, as king of England, able to draw on far greater resources than at the start of his career. In 1073 he led a large English army across the Channel and reconquered Maine in a matter of weeks. But while there is no sense of crisis in the early 1070s, these developments were highly distracting. Increasingly William would have to spend more and more of his time defending his duchy’s borders, refighting old battles against new, more youthful adversaries.
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Thus the government of England had to be entrusted to others. We know that during his first period of absence in 1067, the Conqueror had left William fitz Osbern and Odo of Bayeux in charge of his new kingdom, and it may be that Odo continued to act alone in this capacity after fitz Osbern’s death. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in a retrospective review of William’s reign, tells us unequivocally that his half-brother ‘was master of the land when the king was in Normandy’. Yet there is no evidence to indicate that the bishop was filling this role during the early 1070s, and we know that for at least some of the time he was with William on the other side of the Channel. Other sources, meanwhile, suggest that the principal figure in England during these years was a man of altogether different qualities.
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In August 1070, after some four months of argument, William had finally succeeded in appointing a new archbishop of Canterbury. It was clearly felt important to banish the memory of the worldly and excommunicate Stigand, and thus, as far as the king was concerned,
there was only one man suitable for the job: Lanfranc, his long-time friend and spiritual adviser, the most celebrated scholar in Europe. Lanfranc himself, however, was equally determined that he was not going to accept it. Seven years earlier he had been pressured into becoming the abbot of William’s new monastery of St Stephen’s in Caen, and this time he was adamant: he was not going to move to Canterbury. As he explained to Pope Alexander II a short time later, ‘although that duke, now king of the English, endeavoured in many ways to bring this about, his labours were in vain’. It was only when Alexander, at William’s urging, commanded Lanfranc to accept the archbishopric that the abbot had finally and reluctantly agreed. He was appointed on 15 August 1070 and consecrated in Canterbury a fortnight later, almost certainly in the king’s own presence.
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Lanfranc protested that he was not up to the scale of the task. ‘When I was in charge of the monastery at Caen, I was unequal to ruling a few monks’, he told Alexander, ‘so I cannot conceive by what judgement of almighty God I have at your insistence been made the overseer of many and numberless peoples.’ Much of his reluctance must have stemmed from the fear that, as in Normandy, he would be made responsible for more than these people’s spiritual welfare, and so it proved. It was probably an exaggeration for his twelfth-century biographer to describe Lanfranc as the ‘chief and keeper’ of England during William’s absences, for other men clearly helped share the burden of secular government. Nonetheless, the archbishop’s letters, laced as they are with phrases like ‘instructing you in the king’s name and my own’, indicate that he was exercising something like vice-regal power on his master’s behalf. The letters themselves, collected within a few years of Lanfranc’s death, are one of our most valuable windows on to life in England immediately after the Conquest.
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Although he was periodically called upon for purposes of state, Lanfranc’s principal concern was the Church. Historians continue to argue about the condition of the English Church on the eve of the Conquest, with some maintaining that everything was essentially fine. Both Lanfranc and William, however, saw an institution in desperate need of reform. ‘Before my time,’ the king declared in a writ of the early 1070s, ‘episcopal laws were not properly administered in England according to the precepts of the Holy Canons.’ The writ went on to address the fundamental problem of overlapping jurisdictions. In
Anglo-Saxon England, spiritual crimes such as blasphemy and adultery had been tried in secular courts – a situation that seemed scandalous to reformers like Lanfranc. In future, William explained, they would be heard in special Church courts, before the bishop or his deputy. This meant other changes necessarily had to follow: bishop’s deputies, or archdeacons, had hardly been known in England before 1066; now, because of this new workload, their numbers began to increase dramatically.
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William’s writ also highlights another important innovation, for the king begins by saying he has acted on ‘the common counsel of the archbishops, bishops, abbots and all the magnates of my kingdom’. In pre-Conquest England there had been no reforming councils of the kind familiar in Normandy, but in the Conqueror’s reign they became regular events, with no fewer than five held in the period 1070–6. As the decrees of these councils make clear, Lanfranc was not simply introducing change for its own sake; administrative reform was a necessary first step to correcting people’s religious beliefs. ‘Soothsaying, divination or any such works of the devil should not be practised,’ declared the eighth canon of the Council of London in 1075, ‘as all such things the sacred canons have forbidden, and those who practise them will be excommunicated.’ Of course, the fact that such practices were condemned does not prove that they were any more prevalent in England than elsewhere in Europe, or that the situation in Normandy was any better. When in 1072 the archbishop of Rouen, John of Avranches, decided to take a firm line on clerical celibacy, declaring in a council that married priests must put away their wives, the result was a riot. According to Orderic Vitalis, the archbishop was stoned from his cathedral, crying ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance!’ Lanfranc, perhaps mindful of this episode, took a softer line in England, allowing existing priests to keep their partners, but forbidding clerical marriages in future.
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One important area in which Lanfranc led not so much by prescription but example was architecture. Three years before his appointment, in December 1067, the cathedral church of Canterbury had been gutted by fire (a disaster which reportedly coincided with William’s return to England at that very moment). The new archbishop immediately moved to set matters right, commissioning a brand-new building in the latest Romanesque style. Little of this
work now remains, but from its floor plan we can see that it was closely modelled on Lanfranc’s former abbey of St Stephen’s in Caen, a building which was itself so new that construction work had not yet been completed.
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Where the archbishop led, other churchmen followed. Almost at once the new Norman abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury demolished his old Anglo-Saxon church and commissioned a Romanesque replacement, while in 1072 construction began on a new cathedral at Lincoln, deliberately designed to be as defensible as the nearby castle. During the same decade, other new cathedrals or abbey churches were also started at Salisbury, Chichester, Rochester, St Albans and Winchester (the last two in particular still retaining substantial amounts of their original Norman masonry). It was nothing less than an architectural revolution. Prior to 1066 England had only one comparable structure in the shape of Edward the Confessor’s Westminster Abbey; after 1070, it seems, every bishop and abbot had to have one. These were grand buildings, expensively fashioned in stone (large quantities of which had to be shipped from Caen for the finely carved details) and completed in astonishing time. Lanfranc’s new cathedral was advanced enough to be dedicated in 1077. As William of Malmesbury later declared ‘you do not know which to admire more, the beauty or the speed’.
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It was not just the buildings that were new. In several instances the Normans seized the opportunity to transfer the seat of an ancient English bishopric to a different location. The bishop of Lincoln, for example, had been based before the Conquest at Dorchester-upon-Thames; the bishop of Salisbury had previously operated out of Sherborne, and the bishop of Chichester had earlier resided in the coastal village of Selsey. All were moved during the 1070s, as were the bishops of Lichfield (to Chester) and East Anglia (moved from Elmham to Thetford, and thence, eventually, to Norwich). Again, before the Conquest this had happened only once, when the bishop of Crediton had moved his see to Exeter; after 1070 it became a matter of policy. ‘Episcopal seats should not be in villages, they should be in cities’, agreed the Council of London in 1075, when three of these transfers were approved and others mooted. This was ostensibly for pastoral reasons: being based in urban areas meant that bishops were closer to a greater proportion of their flocks. But security was clearly also a consideration, for cities were safer places for foreigners,
especially if they had castles. The new cathedral at Salisbury (Old Sarum, as it eventually became known) was situated within the castle’s defensive perimeter.
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The architectural results may now seem splendid but, as the concerns about security imply, such changes were not universally welcomed by the natives. Consider, for example, Lanfranc’s rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral. As a necessary prelude to reconstruction, the new archbishop caused all the shrines and relics to be removed from the old fire-damaged church and kept in other buildings (at one stage they were placed in the monks’ refectory). But there was more to this action than careful stewardship. As he explained in 1079 to his fellow scholar (and eventual successor), Anselm of Bec, Lanfranc had serious reservations about Canterbury’s collection of bones. ‘These Englishmen among whom we are living have set up for themselves certain saints whom they revere’, he confided, ‘but sometimes when I turn over in my mind their own accounts of who they were, I cannot help having doubts about the quality of their sanctity.’ Anselm, in response, spoke up for St Ælfheah, the archbishop murdered by the Danes in 1012, and Lanfranc in this particular instance softened his stance, allowing that Ælfheah could be included in Canterbury’s liturgical calendar, albeit celebrated with a feast of the second order. But other long-established local saints – including the most revered of all, St Dunstan – were purged from the community’s commemorative round. Nor is there any sign that the shrines of either Ælfheah or Dunstan were replaced in the new cathedral during Lanfranc’s lifetime. Indeed, it seems likely they remained, along with all the other relics, secreted in an upstairs room above the church’s north transept.
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By acting this way, the new archbishop may not have felt he was doing anything particularly controversial. Like other reformers, Lanfranc wanted to direct popular devotion away from local saints with dubious credentials and focus instead on the figure of Christ himself. Thus when his new church was dedicated in 1077 the ceremony took place not on Dunstan’s feast day but on Palm Sunday, and when the monastic community processed through Canterbury they carried the Eucharist – i.e. the body of Christ – rather than Dunstan’s bones. Yet some Englishmen took considerable offence at the archbishop’s actions. Eadmer of Canterbury, the historian who preserved the above anecdote about Lanfranc’s sceptical attitude towards English saints, prefaced it by saying that sometimes the
archbishop had altered English customs for no reason other than to assert his own authority.
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Moreover, if Lanfranc caused offence at Canterbury, it was nothing compared to that caused elsewhere by some of his subordinates. Adelelm, the new Norman abbot of Abingdon, was remembered in the twelfth century not only for having despoiled his church of its valuables, but also for having dismissed his saintly predecessor, Æthelwold, as an ‘English rustic’. Similarly Lanfranc’s nephew, Paul, who became abbot of St Albans in 1077, was said to have referred to his forebears as ‘uncouth illiterates’, and – following his uncle’s example – to have removed their tombs from the abbey church. There were worse examples. William of Malmesbury describes how the Norman appointed to his monastery in 1070, Abbot Warin, ‘looked with scorn on what his predecessors had achieved, and was governed by a proud distaste for the bodies of the saints’. The pre-Conquest custom at Malmesbury had apparently been to place the bones of bygone abbots in two stone receptacles that stood either side of the altar, the bones themselves carefully kept separate by means of wooden partitions. ‘All these Warin piled up like a heap of rubble, or the remains of worthless hirelings’, says William, ‘and threw them out of the church door.’ The bodies of the saints, meanwhile, were removed to the lesser of the abbey’s two churches and sealed off with stone. A similarly shocking story was recorded at Evesham about the actions of Abbot Walter, who, after his arrival in 1078, reportedly found it difficult to reconcile the sheer number of English saints with the fact of the Norman victory, and so proceeded – on Lanfranc’s orders – to test the sanctity of the abbey’s relics by submitting them to an ordeal by fire. The archbishop’s connection to several of these cases (he was also involved in vetting certain saints at Malmesbury) make it look as if the attitude of Norman newcomers to the English Church was part of an official programme; at the very least it suggests a collective mindset.
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Much of the misunderstanding between the conquerors and the conquered must have been down to language. One of the main arguments Lanfranc had advanced against his promotion to Canterbury was his ignorance of English, and one suspects that it was an ignorance shared by most if not all of the new bishops and abbots, not to mention the new Norman sheriffs and castellans. Of course, some Englishmen must have spoken French, and some Normans probably
learned a little English as a means of getting by without always having to rely on interpreters. According to Orderic Vitalis, the Conqueror himself began to learn English in the hope of being better able to govern his new subjects, but had to abandon the effort as his problems began to multiply.
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