In following the history of Malcolm of Scotland we have passed by events of greater importance which make the year 1093 a turning-point in the reign of William Rufus. The appointment of Anselm to the archbishopric of Canterbury divides the reign into two natural divisions. In the first period William secures his hold on power, develops his tyrannous administrative system and his financial extortions, begins his policy of conquest in Normandy, forces Scotland to recognize his supremacy, and rounds off his kingdom towards the north-west. The second period is more simple in character, but its events are of greater importance. Apart from the abortive rebellion of Robert of Mowbray, which has already been narrated, William's authority is unquestioned. Flambard's machine appears to run smoothly. Monks record their groans and give voice to their horror, but the peace of the state is not disturbed, nor are precautions necessary against any foreign enemy. Two series of events fill up the history of the period, both of great and lasting interest. One is the long quarrel between the king and the archbishop, which involve the whole question of the relation between Church and State in the feudal age; and the other is the king's effort to gain possession of Normandy, the introductory chapter of a long history.
Early in Lent, 1093, or a little earlier, King William fell sick at a royal manor near to Gloucester, and was carried in haste into that city. There he lay during the rest of Lent, so ill that his death was expected at any moment, and it was even reported that he had died. Brought face to face with death, the terrors of the world to come seized hold of him. The medieval sinner who outraged the moral sentiment of his time, as William did, was sustained by no philosophical doubt of the existence of God or belief in the evolutionary origin of ethics. His life was a reckless defiance or a careless disregard of an almighty power, whose determination and ability to punish him, if not bought off, he did not question. The torments of a physical hell were vividly portrayed on all occasions, and accepted by the highest as well as the lowest as an essential part of the divine revelation. William was no exception to this rule. He became even more shockingly defiant of God after his recovery than he had been before. God, he declared to the Bishop of Rochester, should never have in him a good man because of the evil which He had done him. And God let him have what he wished, adds the pious historian, according to the idea of good which he had formed. And yet, if he had been allowed time for a death-bed repentance at the end of his life, he would have yielded undoubtedly to the same vague terrors, and have made a hasty bid for safety with gifts and promises. At any rate now, when the nobles and bishops who came to visit him suggested that it was time for him to make atonement for his evil deeds, he eagerly seized upon the chance. He promised to reform his life, to protect the churches, and not put them up any more for sale, to annul bad laws, and to decree good ones; and bishops were sent to lay these promises on the altar. Some of his good resolutions could only be carried out by virtue of a royal writ, and an order was drawn up and sealed, commanding the release of prisoners, the remission of debts due the crown, and the forgiving of offences. Great was the rejoicing at these signs of reformation, and prayers were, everywhere offered for so good a king, but when he had once recovered, his promises were as quickly forgotten as the very similar ones which he had made in the crisis of the rebellion of loss. William probably still believed, when he found himself restored to health, that nobody can keep all his promises, as he had answered when Lanfranc remonstrated with him on the violation of his coronation pledges. Before his recovery, however, he took one step in the way of reformation from which he did not draw back. He appointed a new Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the fear of death alone which wrung this concession from the king, and it shows a clear consciousness on his part of the guilt of retaining the archbishopric in his hands. Only a few weeks earlier, at the meeting of the Christmas court, when the members had petitioned that he would be graciously pleased to allow prayers to be offered that he might be led to see the wrong which he was doing, he had answered with contempt, "Pray as much as you like; I shall do what I please. Nobody's praying is going to change my mind." Now, however, he was praying himself, and anxious to get rid of this guilt. The man whom all England with one voice declared to be the ideal archbishop was at hand, and the king besought him most earnestly to accept the appointment, and so to aid him in his endeavour to save his soul.
This man was Anselm, now abbot of the famous monastery of Bec, where Lanfranc had been at one time prior. Born sixty years before, at Aosta, in the kingdom of Burgundy, in the later Piedmont, he had crossed into France, like Lanfranc, led by the desire of learning and the religious life. Finally he had become a monk at Bec, and had devoted himself to study and to theological writing. Only with great reluctance, and always imperfectly, did he attend to the administrative duties which fell to him as he was made first prior and then abbot of the monastery. His cast of mind was wholly metaphysical, his spirit entirely of the cloister and the school. The monastic life, free from the responsibilities of office, exactly suited him, and he was made for it. When all England was importuning him to accept the primacy, he shrank back from it with a reluctance which was wholly genuine, and an obstinacy which belonged also to his nature. He felt himself unfitted for the place, and he foresaw the result. He likened his future relation with the king to that of a weak old sheep yoked with an untamed bull. In all this he was perfectly right. That harmony which had existed between Lanfranc and the Conqueror, because each understood the other's position and rights and was interested in his work, was never for a moment possible between Anselm and William Rufus; and this was only partly due to the character of the king. So wholly did the archbishop belong to another world than the king's that he never appreciated the double position in which his office placed him. One side of it only, the ecclesiastical, with its duties and rights and all their logical consequences, he clearly saw. At the beginning of his primacy, he seemed to understand, and he certainly accepted, the feudal relationship in which he was placed to the king, but the natural results of this position he never admitted. His mind was too completely taken up with the other side of things; and with his fixedness of purpose, almost obstinacy of character, and the king's wilfulness, conflict was inevitable.
It was only with great difficulty that Anselm was brought to accept the appointment. Being in England on a visit to Hugh, Earl of Chester, he had been brought to the king's bedside when he fell sick, as the man best able to give him the most certain spiritual comfort; and when William had been persuaded of his guilt in keeping the primacy so long vacant, Anselm was dragged protesting to the presence of the sick man, and his fingers were partially forced open to receive the pastoral staff which William extended to him. Then he was carried off, still protesting, to a church near by, where the religious ceremonies usual on the appointment of a bishop were performed. Still Anselm refused to yield to this friendly violence. He returned immediately to the king, predicted his recovery, and declared that he had not accepted the primacy, and did not accept it, in spite of all that had been done. For some reason, however, William adhered to this much of his reformation. He gave order for the immediate transfer to his appointee of all that pertained to the archbishopric, and sent to Normandy for the consent of the secular and ecclesiastical superiors of Anselm, the duke and the Archbishop of Rouen, and of the monks of his abbey. At length Anselm yielded, not because his judgment had been changed as to the wisdom of the appointment, but sacrificing himself rather, in the monastic spirit, to the call of Heaven.
It was near the end of September, however, before the new archbishop was enthroned. Several matters had first to be arranged to the satisfaction of Anselm, and among these were three conditions which he presented to be agreed to by the king. William was probably ready to agree without hesitation that he would take the archbishop as his guide and director in religious matters, and equally ready to pay no attention to the promise afterward. A more difficult condition was, that all the lands which had belonged to the church of Canterbury at Lanfranc's death should be restored, including, evidently, certain lands which William had granted to his own men. This condition would show that the king had treated the archbishopric as a forfeited fief, and that its lands had been alienated on terms unfavourable to the Church. William hesitated long on this condition, and tried to persuade Anselm to waive it; but the letters of the future archbishop show that his conscience was deeply engaged and would not permit him to agree to anything that would impoverish his see, and the king must have yielded in the end. The third condition was, that Anselm should be allowed to continue in the obedience of Pope Urban II, whom he had already acknowledged in Normandy. This must also have been a disagreeable condition to the king. The divided state of Christendom, into which it had been thrown by the conflict between the pope and the emperor on the question of investitures, was favourable to that autocratic control of the Church which William Rufus desired to maintain. He had no wish to decide between the rival popes, nor was he willing to modify his father's rule that no pope should be recognized by the English Church without the king's consent. We are not told that in this particular he made anything more than a vague promise to do what he ought to do, but very likely Anselm may have regarded this point more as a warning to the king of his own future action than as a necessary condition of his acceptance of the archbishopric.
All these preliminaries being settled in some form satisfactory to Anselm, he yielded to the universal desire, and was enthroned on September 25. The rejoicing of this day at Canterbury was not allowed to go on, however, without interruption by the king. Ranulf Flambard appeared in person and served a writ on the new archbishop, summoning him to answer in some suit in the king's court. The assurance of Anselm's friend and biographer, Eadmer, that this action concerned a matter wholly within the province of the Church, we can hardly accept as conclusive evidence of the fact; but Anselm was certainly right in regarding such an act on this day as foreboding greater troubles to come. On December 4, Anselm was consecrated at an assembly of almost all the bishops of England, including Thomas, Archbishop of York. The occasion is noteworthy because the Archbishop of York interrupted the proceedings to object to the term "metropolitan of all Britain," applied to the church of Canterbury, calling attention to the fact that the church of York was known to be metropolitan also. The term primate was at once substituted for that of metropolitan, since the archbishops of Canterbury did not claim the right to exercise an administrative authority within the see of York.
It is interesting to notice, in view of the conflict on investitures which was before long to begin in England, and which had already been for years so bitterly fought upon the continent, that all these events happened without the slightest questioning on the part of any one of the king's sole right to dispose of the highest see of the realm as he pleased. There was no suggestion of the right of election, no objection to lay investiture, no protest from any one. Anselm accepted investiture with the staff from the hand of the king without remark. He acknowledged his feudal relation to him, swore fealty to him as a vassal,[15] and was ready to perform his obligations of feudal service, at least upon his own interpretation of their extent. A little later, in 1095, after the first serious conflict between himself and the king, when the papal legate in England took of him his oath of fealty to the pope, the oath contained the usual Norman clause reserving his fealty to the king. A clause in the bishop's oath to the pope so unusual as this could not have passed in that age without notice. It occasioned instant criticism from strict ecclesiastics on the continent, and it must have been consciously inserted by Anselm and consciously accepted by the legate. Such facts as these, combined with the uncompromising character of Anselm, are more striking evidence of the absolutism of the Norman monarchy than anything which occurred in the political world during this period.
Within a few days after his consecration, Anselm set out from Canterbury to attend the Christmas meeting of the king's court at Gloucester. There he was well received by the king, but the most important business before the court was destined to lead to the first breach between them. Robert of Normandy had grown tired of his brother's long delay in keeping the promises which he had made in the treaty of Caen. Now there appeared at Gloucester a formal embassy from him, authorized to declare William forsworn and faithless, and to renounce all peace and agreement with him unless he held to the treaty or exculpated himself in due form. There could be no hesitation about an answer to this demand. It is more than likely that William himself, within a short time, would have sought for some excuse to begin again his conquest of Normandy, if Robert had not furnished him this one. War was at once resolved upon, and preparations made for an immediate campaign. The most important preliminary question, both for William and for England, was that of money, and on this question the scruples of Anselm and the will of the king first came into collision. Voluntary aids, donations of money for the special undertakings or necessities of the king, were a feature of William's financial management, though their voluntary character seems often to have been more a matter of theory than of reality. If the sum offered was not so large as the king expected, he refused to accept it and withdrew his favour from the delinquent until he received the amount he thought proper. Anselm was persuaded by his friends to conform to this custom, and hoping that he might in this way secure the favour and support of the king in his ecclesiastical plans, he offered him five hundred pounds of silver. At first William was pleased with the gift and accepted it, but his counsellors advised him that it was too small, and Anselm was informed that it would not be received. The archbishop's attempt to persuade William to take the money only called out an angry answer. "Keep your own to yourself," the king said, "I have enough of mine;" and Anselm went away rejoicing that now evil-minded men would have no occasion to say that he had bought his office, and he promised the money to the poor. The archbishop was acting here entirely within his legal rights, but it was not an auspicious beginning of his pontificate. Within a few weeks the prelates and nobles of England were summoned to meet again—at Hastings, from which port the king intended to cross to Normandy. The weather was for some weeks unfavourable, and during the delay the church of the new abbey of Battle was dedicated; Robert Bloet, who had been appointed Bishop of Lincoln while the king was in fear of death, was consecrated, though Anselm himself had not as yet received his pallium from the pope; and Herbert Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, who had bought his bishopric from the king and afterwards, apparently in repentance, had personally sought the confirmation of the pope, was suspended from his office because he had left the realm without the permission of the king and had sought from the unacknowledged Pope Urban the bishopric which the king asserted his full right to confer. He afterwards recovered William's favour and removed his see to Norwich. At Hastings, in a personal interview with the king, Anselm sought permission to hold a synod of the kingdom, which had not up to this time been allowed during the reign, and remonstrated with him in the plainest language for keeping so many monasteries without abbots while he used their revenues for wars and other secular purposes. In both respects William bluntly refused to change his conduct, and when Anselm sought through the bishops the restoration of his favour, refused that also "because," he said, "I do not know why I should grant it." When it was explained to Anselm that this was a formula of the king's which meant that his favour was to be bought, he refused on grounds of policy as well as of principle to increase, or even to renew, his former offer. This seemed like a final breach with the king. William's anger was great when he heard of Anselm's decision. He declared that he would hate him constantly more and more, and never would hold him for his spiritual father or a bishop. "Let him go home as soon as he likes," he cried, "he need not wait any longer to give his blessings to my crossing over" and Anselm departed at once from Hastings.
On March 19, 1094, William at last crossed to Normandy. The campaign which followed was without decisive results. He was no nearer the conquest of the duchy at the end than at the beginning. Indeed, we can hardly say that the campaign had an end. It died away by degrees, but no formal peace was made, and the duchy came finally into the hands of William, not by conquest, but by other means. On William's landing an attempt was made to renew the peace at an interview between him and Robert, but without avail. Then those who had signed the treaty of Caen as guarantors, twelve barons for Robert and twelve for William, were called upon to say who was acting in violation of the treaty. They decided, apparently without disagreement, against William, but he refused to be bound by their verdict. The war which followed was a typical feudal war, the siege of castles, the capture of men and towns. Robert called in once more his suzerain, Philip of France, to his aid, and captured two important castles, that of Argentan towards the south, and that of La Houlme in the north-west. William then took a step which illustrates again the extent of his power and his arbitrary use of it. He ordered a levy of ten thousand men from England to be sent him in Normandy, and when they had assembled at Hastings, Ranulf Flambard, by the king's orders we are told, took from them the ten shillings which each man had been furnished for his expenses, and sent them home. Robert and Philip were now marching against William at Eu, and it was probably by the liberal use of this money that "the king of France was turned back by craft and all the expedition dispersed." About the same time William sent for his brother Henry to join him. Henry had reappeared in western Normandy not long before, and had begun the reconstruction of his power there. Invited by the inhabitants of Domfront to protect them against Robert of BellÊme, he had made that place a starting-point from which he had recovered a considerable part of his earlier possessions. Now William sent ships to bring him by sea to Eu, probably wishing to use his military skill against their common enemy. For some reason, however, the ships departed from their course, and on the last day of October he landed at Southampton, where he stayed some weeks. On December 28, William also returned to England, and in the spring, Henry was sent back to Normandy with supplies of money to keep up the war against Robert.
The year 1094 had been a hard one for both England and Normandy. The duchy had suffered more from the private wars which prevailed everywhere, and which the duke made no effort to check, than from the invasion of William. England in general had had peace, under the strong hand of the king, but so heavy had been the burden of the taxation which the war in Normandy had entailed that agriculture declined, we are told, and famine and pestilence followed. In the west the Welsh had risen against the Norman lords, and had invaded and laid waste parts of the English border counties. In Scotland William's ally, Duncan, had been murdered, and his uncle, Donald, who represented the Scottish national party, had been made king in his place. William found difficulties enough in England to occupy him for some time, particularly when, as was told above, the refusal of Robert of Mowbray to appear at court in March revealed the plans of the barons for another insurrection.
Before he could attempt to deal with any of these difficulties, however, another question, more troublesome still, was forced upon the king. A few weeks after his landing Anselm came to him and asked leave to go to Rome to get his pallium from the pope. "From which pope?" asked the king. Anselm had already given warning of the answer which he must make, and at once replied, "From Urban." Here was joined an inevitable issue between the king and the archbishop; inevitable, not because of the character of the question but because of the character of the two men. No conflict need have arisen upon this question. When Anselm had remonstrated with the king on the eve of his Norman 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 important 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 in England, could have safely overlooked Anselm's personal 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 Canterbury, 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 Anselm which would have at least the practical effect of vacating the archbishopric, but he met with failure in his purpose, whatever it was, and this it seems less from the resistance 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 obligations to the king. At last the actual decision of the question was postponed to a meeting to be held on the octave of Whitsuntide, 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 deposition 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, Walter, 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 without 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 William 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 communication 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 everything was going as he wished, and public 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 publicly with the archbishop, and to content himself with certain not unimportant concessions, which the cardinal wisely yielded, but which brought upon him the censure of the extreme Church party. Anselm promised to observe faithfully the laws and customs of the kingdom; at this time also was sworn his oath of fidelity to the pope, with the clause reserving 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 Anselm took it as if he had received it from the hands of the pope.
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 English 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 compelled to come up to the Christmas court, though too ill to travel. He left incomplete his new cathedral of 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 lighter 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 profound 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 opportunity 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 marks—the mark was two-thirds of a pound—and received 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 certainty, 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 bargain, 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 England 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 Canterbury 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 like the first upon the land. The whole formed a burden likely to cripple seriously the primitive agriculture of the time, as we are told that it did.
Having taken possession of Normandy, William returned 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 according to the sentence of the king's court whenever he should bring suit against him. To this letter Anselm paid no attention, 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 conscientiousness, and he had evidently been for some time coming to the conclusion that he must personally seek the advice of the head of the Church as to his conduct in such a difficult situation. 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 vexatious 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 irreconcilable conflict between Church and State in that age, irreconcilable 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 political side, regarding 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 religious institution, charged with a spiritual mission and the work of moral reformation, we must consider Anselm's conduct 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 during 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 William Rufus is an interesting question, but one which we cannot answer. He certainly would not have put himself legally in the wrong, as Anselm did, and he would have considered 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 believed that if he accepted as the conditions of his work the evils with which he was surrounded, and consented 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 agreement with hell."
Anselm left England early in November, 1097, not 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 position 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 ceremonial 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 Christian 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, William 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 Norman rule had been thrown off, and after a few months Elias of La Fleche, a baron of Maine and a descendant 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 William 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, simultaneous 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 operations were almost all successful, but he died without accomplishing 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 southern 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 invasion 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 BellÊme, 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 possessed in southern Normandy and just over the border in France, made him the most powerful vassal of the English king. In character he had inherited far more from his tyrannous and cruel mother, Mabel, daughter of William Talvas of BellÊme, 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 Edgar's nephew, himself named Edgar, with the support of the English king, had been made king. In 1099 Ranulf Flambard received the reward of his faithful services, and was made Bishop of Durham, in some respects the most desirable 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, 1100, William 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 evil that was done in the making of the Forest. The king's body was brought to Winchester, where it was buried in the old minster, but without the ordinary funeral rites. One of his companions that day, Walter Tirel, a French baron who had been attracted to the service of the king by the prospect of rich reward which it offered, was thought to have been responsible for his death, and he fled in haste and escaped to his home; but he afterwards solemnly declared, when there would have been no danger to himself in confession, that it was not his arrow that slew the king, and whose it was will never be known.
