expedition, about the vacant abbeys that were in his hands,
William in anger had replied that Lanfranc would never
have dared to use such language to his father. We may
be sure for one thing, that Lanfranc would have dared to
oppose the first William with all his might, if he had thought
the reason sufficient, but also that his more practical mind
would never have allowed him to regard this question as im-
^ portant enough to warrant the evils that would follow in the
train of an open quarrel between king and primate. During
the last years of Lanfranc's life, at least from 1084, no pope
had been formally recognized in England. To Anselm's
mind, however, the question was one of vital importance,
where delay would be the sacrifice of principle to expediency.
On the other hand, it seems clear to us, looking back on
these events, that William, from the strength of his position
I095 THE QUESTION OF WHICH POPE loi
in England, could have safely overlooked Anselm's personal chap.
recognition of Urban, and could have tacitly allowed him ^
even to get his pallium from the pope without surrendering
anything of his own practical control of the Church. William,
however, refused to take this course. Perhaps he had come
to see that a conflict with Anselm could not be avoided, and
chose not to allow him any, even merely formal, advantages.
The student of this crisis is tempted to believe, from the facts
of this case, from the king's taking away *' the staff " from the
Bishop of Thetford, if the words used refer to anything more
than a confiscation of his fief, and especially from his steady
refusal to allow the meeting of a national council, that William
had conceived the idea of an independent Church under his
supreme control in all that pertained to its government, and
that he was determined to be rid of an Archbishop of Canter-
bury, who would never consent to such a plan.
Of the dispute which followed we have a single interesting
and detailed account, written by Eadmer who was in personal
attendance on Anselm through it all, but it is the account
of a devoted partisan of the archbishop which, it is clear, we
cannot trust for legal distinctions, and which is not entirely
consistent with itself. According to this narrative, William
asserted that Anselm's request, as amounting to an official
recognition of one of the two popes, was an attack upon his
sovereignty as king. This Anselm denied, — he could not
well appreciate the point, — and he affirmed that he could at
the same time be true to the pope whom he had recognized
and to the king whose man he was. This was perfectly true
from Anselm's point of view, but the other was equally true
from William's. The fundamental assumptions of the two men
were irreconcilable. The position of the bishop in a powerful
feudal monarchy was an impossible one without some such
practical compromise of tacit concessions from both sides, as
existed between Lanfranc and William I. Anselm desired
that this question, whether he could not at the same time
preserve his fidelity to both pope and king, be submitted to
the decision of the king's court, and that body was summoned
to meet at Rockingham castle at an early date.
The details of the case we cannot follow. The king
appears to have been desirous of getting a condemnation of
102 WILLIAM RUFUS AND ANSELM 1095
CHAP. Anselm which would have at least the practical effect of
^ vacating the archbishopric, but he met with failure in his pur-
pose, whatever it was, and this it seems less from the resist-
ance of the bishops to his will than from the explicit refusal
of the lay barons to regard Anselm as no longer archbishop.
The outcome of the case makes it clear that there was in
Anselm's position no technical violation of his feudal obliga-
tions to the king. At last the actual decision of the question
was postponed to a meeting to be held on the octave of Whit-
suntide, but in the meantime the king had put into operation
another plan which had been devised for accomplishing his
wish. He secretly despatched two clerks of his chapel to
Italy, hoping, so at least Anselm's biographer believed, to
obtain, as the price of his recognition of Urban, the depo-
, sition of Anselm by the authority of the pope for whom he
was contending. The opportunity was eagerly embraced at
Rome. A skilful and not over-scrupulous diplomatist, Wal-
ter, Cardinal-Bishop of Albano, was immediately sent back
to England with the messengers of Rufus, doubtless with
instructions to get as much as possible from the king with-
out yielding the real principle involved in Anselm's case.
In the main point Walter was entirely successful. The man
of violent temper is not often fitted for the personal conflicts
of diplomacy ; at least in the strife with the papal legate the
king came off second best. It is more to be wondered at
that a man of so acute a mind as WiUiam of St. Calais, who
was now one of the king's most intimate advisers, did not
demand better guarantees.
Cardinal Walter carefully abstained at first from any com-
munication with Anselm. He passed through Canterbury
without the archbishop's knowledge ; he seemed to acquiesce
in the king's view of the case. William believed that every-
thing was going as he wished, and pubHc proclamation was
made that Urban was to be obeyed throughout his dominions.
But when he pressed for a deposition of Anselm, he found
that this had not been included in the bargain ; nor could
he gain, either from the legate or from Anselm, the privilege
of bestowing the pallium himself. He was obliged to yield
in everything which he had most desired; to reconcile himself
pubHcly with the archbishop, and to content himself with
I095 THE KING APPLIES TO THE POPE 103
certain not unimportant concessions, which the cardinal wisely chap.
yielded, but which brought upon him the censure of the ^
extreme Church party. Anselm promised to observe faith-
fully the laws and customs of the kingdom ; at this time also
was sworn his oath of fidelity to the pope, with the clause re-
serving his fealty to the king ; and Cardinal Walter formally
agreed that legates should be sent to England only with the
consent of the king. But in the most important points which
concerned the conflict with the archbishop the king had been
defeated. Urban was officially recognized as pope, and the
legate entered Canterbury in solemn procession, bearing the
pallium, and placed it on the altar of the cathedral, from
which Anselrn,took it as if he had received it from the hands
of the pope. I
Inferences of a constitutional sort are hardly warranted by
the character of our evidence regarding this quarrel, but the
facts which we know seem to imply that even so powerful
and arbitrary a king as William Rufus could not carry out
a matter on which his heart was so set as this without some
pretence of legal right to support him, at least in the case of
so high a subject as the Archbishop of Canterbury; and that
the barons of the kingdom, with the law on their side, were
able to hold the king's will in check. Certainly the different
attitude of the barons in the quarrel of 1097, where Anselm
was clearly in the wrong, is very suggestive.
Already before the close of this business the disobedience
of Robert of Mowbray had revealed to the king the plot
against him, and a considerable part of the summer of 1095
was occupied in the reduction of the strongholds of the Earl
of Northumberland. In October the king invaded Wales in
person, but found it impossible to reach the enemy, and
retired before the coming on of winter. In this year died
the aged Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, the last of the Eng-
lish bishops who survived the Conquest. His bishopric fell
into the hands of Flambard, and furnishes us one of the best
examples we have of his treatment of these fiefs. On the
first day of the next year died also William of St. Calais,
Bishop of Durham, who had once more fallen under the
king's displeasure for some reason, and who had been com-
pelled to come up to the Christmas court, though too ill to
104 WILLIAM RUFUS AND ANSELM 1096
CHAP, travel. He left incomplete his new cathedral 0/ Durham,
^ which he had begun on a splendid scale soon after his return
from exile early in the reign, beginning also a new period in
Norman architecture of Ughter and better-proportioned forms,
with no sacrifice of the impression of solid strength.
This year of 1096, which thus began for England with the
death of one of the ablest of her prelates, is the date of the
beginning for Europe as a whole of one of the most pro-
found movements of medieval times. The crusades had long
been in preparation, but it was the resolution and eloquence
of Pope Urban which turned into a definite channel the
strong ascetic feeling and rapidly growing chivalric passion
of the west, and opened this great era. The Council of
Clermont, at which had occurred Urban's famous appeal
and the enthusiastic vow of the crusaders, had been held in
November, 1095, and the impulse had spread rapidly to all
parts of France. The English nation had no share in this
first crusade, and but little in the movement as a whole ;
but its history was from the beginning greatly influenced by
it. Robert of Normandy was a man of exactly the type to
be swept away by such a wave of enthusiasm, and not to
feel the strength of the motives which should have kept him
at home. His duty as sovereign of Normandy, to recover
the castles held by his brother, and to protect his subjects
from internal war, were to him as nothing when compared
with his duty to protect pious pilgrims to the tomb of Christ,
and to deliver the Holy Land from the rule of the infidel.
William Rufus, on the other hand, was a man to whom
the motives of the crusader would never appeal, but who
stood ready to turn to his own advantage every opportu-
nity which the folly of his brother might offer. Robert's
most pressing need in such an undertaking was for money,
and so much more important did this enterprise seem to
him than his own proper business that he stood ready to
deliver the duchy into the hands of his brother, with whom
he was even then in form at war for its possession, if he
could in that way obtain the necessary resources for his
crusade. William was as eager to get the duchy as Robert
was to get the money, and a bargain was soon struck
between them. William carried over to Normandy 10,000
1096 ROBERT MORTGAGES NORMANDY TO WILLIAM 105
marks — the mark was two-thirds of a pound — and received chap.
from Robert, as a pledge for the payment of the loan, the ^
possession of the duchy for a period of at least three years,
and for how much longer we cannot now determine with cer-
tainty, but for a period which was probably intended to
cover Robert's absence. The duke then set off at once on
his crusade, satisfied with the consciousness that he was
following the plain path of duty. With him went his
uncle, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, to die in Sicily in the next
winter.
William had bought the possession of Normandy at a bar-
gain, but he did not propose to pay for it at his own cost.
The money which he had spent, and probably more than that,
he recovered by an extraordinary tax in England, which
excited the bitter complaints of the ecclesiastical writers.
If we may trust our interpretation of the scanty accounts
which have reached us, this money was raised in two ways,
by a general land-tax and by additional personal payments
from the king's own vassals. By grant of the barons of Eng-
land a Danegeld of four shillings on the hide, double the
usual tax, was collected, and this even from the domain lands
of the Church, which it was asserted, though with doubtful
truth, had always been exempt. The clergy paid this tax,
but entered formal protest against it, probably in order to
prevent, if possible, the establishment of a precedent against
their liberties. The additional payment suggested by some
of the chroniclers is to be seen in detail in the case of
Anselm, who regarded this as a reasonable demand on the
part of the king, and who, besides passing over to the treasury
what he collected from his men, made on advice a personal
payment of 200 marks, which he borrowed from the Canter-
bury monks on the security of one of his domain manors.
Not all the churches were so fortunate as to have the ready
money in the treasury, and in many cases ornaments and
sacred utensils were sacrificed, while the lay lords undoubtedly
recovered their payments by like personal auxilia from their
men, until the second tax really rested Hke the first upon
the land. The whole formed a burden likely to cripple seri-
ously the primitive agriculture of the time, as we are told
that it did.
io6 WILLIAM RUFUS AND ANSELM 1097
CHAP. Having taken possession of Normandy, William returned
V to England at Easter in 1097. The Welsh had been making
trouble again, and the king once more marched against them
in person ; but a country like Wales was easily defended
against a feudal army, and the expedition accomplished little
and suffered much, especially in the loss of horses. William
returned probably in no very amiable mood, and at once sent
off a letter to Anselm complaining that the contingent of
knights which he had sent to meet his obligation of service
in the campaign was badly furnished and not fit for its
duties, and ordered him to be ready to do him right accord-
ing to the sentence of the king's court whenever he should
bring suit against him. To this letter Anselm paid no atten-
tion, and he resolved to let the suit against him go by default,
on the ground that everything was determined in the court
by the will of the king, and that he could get no justice there.
In taking this position, the archbishop was putting himself
in the wrong, for the king was acting clearly within his legal
rights; but this fact Anselm probably did not understand.
He could not enter into the king's position nor his own in
relation to him, but he might have remembered that two
years before, for once at least, the king had failed to carry
through his will in his court.
The case came on for trial at the Whitsuntide court at
Windsor, but before anything was determined Anselm sent by
certain barons to ask the king's leave to go to Rome, which
/ was at once refused. This action was evidently not intended
by Anselm as an appeal of the case to Rome, nor was it so
understood by the king ; but for some reason the suits against
him were now dropped. Anselm's desire to visit Rome
apparently arose from the general condition of things
in the kingdom, from his inability to hold synods, to get
important ecclesiastical offices filled, or to reform the evils of
government and morals which prevailed under William. In
other words, he found himself nominally primate of England
and metropolitan of the great province of Canterbury, but in
reality with neither power nor influence. Such a condition
of things was intolerable to a man of Anselm's conscien-
tiousness, and he had evidently been for some time coming to
the conclusion that he must personally seek the advice of the
1097 THE ARCHBISHOP BEFORE THE COURT 107
head of the Church as to his conduct in such a difficult situa- chap.
tion. He had now definitely made up his mind, and as the ^
Bishop of Winchester told him at this time, he was not easy
to be moved from a thing he had once undertaken. He
repeated his request in August, and again in October of the
same year. On the last occasion William lost his temper and
threatened him with another suit in the court for his vexa- /
tious refusal to abide by the king's decision. Anselm insisted
on his right to go. William pointed out to him, that if he
.was determined to go, the result would be the confiscation of
the archbishopric, — that is, of the barony. Anselm was not
moved by this. Then the bishops attempted to show him
the error of his ways, but there was so little in common
between their somewhat worldly position as good vassals of
the king, and his entire other-worldliness, that nothing was
gained in this way. Finally, William informed him that if
he chose he might go, on the conditions which had been
explained to him, — that is, of the loss of all that he held of
the king. This was permission enough for Anselm, and he ^
at once departed, having given his blessing to the king.
No case could be more typical than this of the irrecon-
cilable conflict between Church and State in that age, irrecon-
cilable except by mutual concessions and compromise, and
the willingness of either to stand partly in the position of the
other. If we look at the matter from the poHtical side, re-
garding the bishop as a public officer, as a baron in a feudally
organized state, the king was entirely right in this case, and
fully justified in what he did. Looking at the Church as a
reHgious institution, charged with a spiritual mission and the
work of moral reformation, we must consider Anselm's con-
duct justified, as the only means by which he could hope to
obtain freedom of action. Both were in a very real sense
right in this quarrel, and both were wrong. Not often dur-
ing the feudal period did this latent contradiction of rights
come to so open and plain an issue as this. That it did so
here was due in part to the character of the king, but in the
main to the character of the archbishop. Whether Lanfranc
could have continued to rule the Church in harmony with
WilHam Rufus is an interesting question, but one which we
cannot answer. He certainly would not have put himself
loS WILLIAM RUFUS AND ANSELM 1097
CHAP, legally in the wrong, as Anselm did, and he would have con-
^ sidered carefully whether the good to be gained for the cause
of the Church from a quarrel with the king would outweigh
the evil. Anselm, however, was a man of the idealistic type
of mind, who beheved that if he accepted as the conditions of
his work the evils with which he was surrounded, and con-
sented to use the tools that he found ready to his hand, he
had made, as another reformer of somewhat the same type
once said of the constitution of the United States in the
matter of slavery, " a covenant with death and an agree-
ment with hell."
Anselm left England early in November, 1097, ^^^t to
return during the lifetime of William. If he had hoped,
through the intervention of the pope, to weaken the hold of
the king on the Church of England, and to be put in a posi-
tion where he could carry out the reforms on which his heart
was set, he was doomed to disappointment. After a stay
of some months at Lyons, with his friend Archbishop Hugh,
he went on to Rome, where he was treated with great cere-
monial honour by the pope, but where he learned that the
type of lofty and uncompromising independence which he
^ himself represented was as rare in the capital of the Chris-
tian world as he had found it among the bishops of England.
There, however, he learned a stricter doctrine on the subject
of lay investitures, of appointments to ecclesiastical office
by kings and princes, than he had yet held, so that when he
finally returned to England he brought with him the germs
of another bitter controversy with a king, with whom but for
this he might have lived in peace.
In the same month with Anselm, WilHam also crossed
to Normandy, but about very different business. Hardly
had he obtained possession of the duchy when he began to
push the claims of the duke to bordering lands, to the
French Vexin, and to the county of Maine, claims about
which his brother had never seriously concerned himself
and which, in one case, even his father had allowed to
slumber for years. Robert had, indeed, asserted his claim
to Maine after the death of his father, and had been accepted
by the county; but a revolt had followed in 1190, the Nor-
man rule had been thrown off, and after a few months
1098 ANSELM LEAVES ENGLAND 109
Elias of La Fleche, a baron of Maine and a descendant chap.
of the old counts, had made himself count. He was a man ^
of character and ability, and the peace which he established
was practically undisturbed by Robert ; but the second Will-
iam had no mind to give up anything to which he could lay
a claim. He demanded of the French king the surrender
of the Vexin, and warned Elias, who had taken the cross,
that the holy errand of the crusade would not protect his
lands during his absence. War followed in both cases, simul-
taneous wars, full of the usual incidents, of the besieging
of castles, the burning of towns, the laying waste of the
open country ; wars in which the ruin of his peasantry was
almost the only way of coercing the lord. William's opera-
tions were almost all successful, but he died without accom-
plishing all that he had hoped for in either direction. In
the Vexin he captured a series of castles, which brought
him almost to Paris ; in Maine he captured Le Mans, lost
it again, and finally recovered its possession, but the south-
ern part of the county and the castles of Elias there he
never secured.
In the year 1098 Magnus, king of Norway, had appeared
for a moment with a hostile fleet off the island of Anglesey.
Some reason not certainly known had brought him round
Scotland, perhaps to make an attack on Ireland. He was
the grandson of the King Harold of Norway, who had invaded
England on the eve of the Norman Conquest and perished in
the battle of Stamford Bridge, and he had with him, it is said,
a son of Harold of England : to him the idea of a new inva-
sion of England would not seem strange. At any rate, after
taking possession of the Isle of Man, he came to the help
of the Welsh against the earls, Hugh of Chester and Hugh of
Shrewsbury, who were beginning the conquest of Anglesey.
The incident is noteworthy because, in the brief fighting
which occurred, the Earl of Shrewsbury was slain. His
death opened the way for the succession of his brother,
Robert of Belleme, to the great English possessions of their
father in Wales, Shropshire, and Surrey, to which he soon
added by inheritance the large holdings of Roger of Bully
in Yorkshire and elsewhere. These inheritances, when added
to the lands, almost a principality in themselves, which he
no WILLIAM RUFUS AND ANSELM 1099
CHAP, possessed in southern Normandy and just over the border
^ in France, made him the most powerful vassal of the Eng-
lish king. In character he had inherited far more from his
tyrannous and cruel mother, Mabel, daughter of William
Talvas of Belleme, than from his more high-minded father,
Roger of Montgomery, the companion of the Conqueror.
As a vassal he was utterly untrustworthy, and he had become
too powerful for his own safety or for that of the king.
Some minor events of these years should be recounted.
In 1097 William had sent Edgar the atheling to Scotland
with an army, King Donald had been overthrown, and Ed-
gar's nephew, himself named Edgar, with the support of the
English king, had been made king. In 1099 Ranulf Flam-
bard received the reward of his faithful services, and was
made Bishop of Durham, in some respects the most desir-
able bishopric in England. Greater prospects still of power
and dominion were opened to William a few months before
his death, by the proposition of the Duke of Aquitaine to
pledge him his great duchy for a sum of money to pay the
expenses of a crusade. To add to the lands he already
ruled those between the Loire and the Garonne would be
almost to create a new monarchy in France and to threaten
more dangerously at this moment the future of the Capetian
kingdom than did two generations later the actual union of
these territories and more under the king of England.
But William was now rapidly approaching the term of his
life. The monastic chronicles, written within a generation
or two later, record many visions and portents of the time
foreshadowing the doom which was approaching, but these
are to us less records of actual facts than evidences of the
impression which the character and government of the king
had made, especially upon the members of the Church. On
August 2, 1 100, WilHam rode out to hunt in the New Forest,
as was his frequent custom. In some way, how we do not
know, but probably by accident, he was himself shot with an
arrow by one of his company, and died almost instantly.
Men believed, not merely that he was justly cut off in his
sins with no opportunity for the final offices of the Church,
but that his violent death was an instance, the third already,
of the doom which followed his father's house because of the
iioo WILLIAM RUFUS KILLED in