AND OF MANY OTHER PRELATES.

641

to the penance of perpetual imprisonment in the castle of Winchester: a scanty diet, insufficient for the wants of the old man, was allowed by the parsimony of the Exchequer. His friends advised him to provide himself with better food; he replied that he had not a penny. At last he died; and when they were stripping the shrunken corpse, they found a little key hung round his neck, and certain schedules of parchment containing an account of the treasure heaped up in the vault which that key opened, and to which he had thus clung to the very last. The blow Other thus struck was speedily followed up. Bishops and abbots were successively removed, many for sufficient cause, some perhaps unfairly; and this plan being consistently and steadily pursued, scarcely two more years had elapsed when Wulstan of Worcester was perhaps the only English bishop remaining in the realm; and for more than a generation, no Englishman was suffered to acquire any ecclesiastical dignity.

depositions.

reasons.

24. The constant overruling of the devices of man, is the perpetual key to the intricacies of human affairs. What sought William in the William's deposition of the English prelates? Why did he place the whole nation under a ban, rendering their name and race an exclusion from the Church of their fathers? His own pleasure, the security and consolidation of his own power. But the very measures which he employed worked against his own intent, and the wrong

642

GOOD RESULTS OF HIS SEVERITY.

These

changes make

men.

produced the remedy. Had the Conquest taken place a generation earlier, the irruption of the Normans would have been as injurious to the intellectual advancement of England as the invasions of the Danes, for under the first five dukes their own subjects neglected all useful learning. Fierce and untameable, they united the roughness of the barbarian to the heartlessness of partial civilization. But destined as the way for abler Normans were to effect a mighty change in the fortunes of Christendom, there was given to them the talent of seeking out the means of improvement. Of the eminent men who adorn the Norman annals, perhaps the smallest proportion were of Norman race. Discernment in the choice of talent, munificence in rewarding ability, may be justly ascribed to the Norman rulers. If in the Norman there was an entire absence of real national feeling, there was an equal absence of national jealousy; and at the same time that William was effecting the conquest of England, the way was prepared for rendering that conquest the means of introducing the teachers who were to reclaim the English Church from sloth and spiritual degeneracy.

Lanfranc.

25. Amongst those whose names the dying king enumerated, as testifying by their lives and conversations, that to the best of his power he had well exercised the trust for which he was now called to render an account, were those of Lanfranc and his successor Anselm. Of the second,

CAREER OF LANFRANC.

we shall speak hereafter.

643

[The career of the

Lanfranc's later career.

first we have traced to the period of William's marriage.] He had already refused the Archbishoprick of Rouen, offered to him upon the death of Maurellius, the Italian ; and he equally shrunk from the acceptance of the see of Canterbury. In this dignity there was nothing which could tempt him. He delighted in the pleasant places in which his lot had been cast. Pursuing still with unabated zeal the studies which had raised him to eminence, and which were now giving him the more enduring gratification of the consciousness that he had been the means of training others to follow in the same good path, he was most loth to quit his solitude. But, yielding at length to the commands of the King and the solicitations of the Norman clergy, he accepted the unwelcome mitre, and was in- Is appointed stalled with more than usual solemnity in the metropolitan cathedral. He was most joyfully accepted by the people, who hailed him as a father; and henceforth Lanfranc deemed himself to be an Englishman, and identified himself entirely with the community to which he was now allied, but without in anywise departing from the fidelity which he was bound to render to his Sovereign. According to the old English constitution, the Archbishop of Canterbury was, as I have before observed, a species of tribune of the people. He was William's chief adviser. To this was added

archbishop.

Lanfranc's general conduct.

the authority of justiciar, or, as we should say, regent, which he exercised whenever William was absent from the realm; and pre-eminent as the station was which Lanfranc holds in the written history of the reigns of the Conqueror and of Rufus, it was the silent, or, at least, the unrecorded influence exercised by him as a statesman which rendered him most beneficial to the people. On Lanfranc, as Archbishop, we shall speak hereafter more particularly. In his mixed character, as the chief of the lords spiritual, he may be considered as the great *supporter, in some respects the founder, of the constitution. His firm, but temperate defence of the rights of the Church, enabled his successors to be the defenders of the rights of the state. There is no true defender of one without the other. The crozier of Lanfranc, handed down by Anselm and Becket to Hubert and Langton, did more for Magna Charta than the sword.

26. It is the common error of all men to pride themselves upon their one good quality, which they consider as giving them a receipt in full for all the opposite failings and sins. William was clear of simony, the sin which, as I have before observed, corrupted the appointments of the Church in their very source, and in which almost all his compeers participated with the utmost gladness and greediness. Pope Gregory held him up, in this respect, as an example to

OTHER APPOINTMENTS BY WILLIAM.

645

choice of

others. But as the canonists lay down in grave technical aphorisms, what we all know from common sense-would that we did not from daily experience-the spirit of the prohibition may be fully violated, although the hard money may never have passed; and whilst William's William most religiously abstained from be- prelates. stowing his prelacies in consequence of the "munus a manu," still he indemnified himself most amply by the "munus a lingua," and the "munus ab obsequio," deriving perhaps even more convenience and advantage from these considerations, than as if the preferment had. been sold as the next presentation to an advowson is at the present day.

Gilbert Maminot was recommended by his Maminot. great skill in medicine and also in astronomy. He was a court physician and court astrologer: felt the Conqueror's pulse and cast his horoscope. In the knowledge of a useful art there was nothing uncanonical; nor would the care of bodies have necessarily disqualified him for the care of souls; but what was the Bishop in other respects? The sports of the field, hunting and hawking, were his amusements. Science [also was his,]-for he was deeply learned according to the standard of the age, and one of his observations, accidentally preserved, forms an important link in the annals of the visible heavens. To these he added the habits of the camp. He was liberal and merry, fond of good