§ 22. CONFLICT OF THE HIERARCHY IN ENGLAND. 83
aspired to be popes of England long before Henry VIII. blasphemously called himself " Supreme Head of the Church of England."
Under the later kings of the Saxon line the Church had degenerated, and was as much in need of reform as the churches on the Continent. The ascetic reforms of Dunstan took no deep root and soon passed away. Eadward the Con fessor (1042-1066) was a monastic saint, but a stranger and shadow in England, with his heart in Normandy, the home of his youth. The old Saxon literature was forgotten, and the clergy was sunk in ignorance.1 No ecclesiastical synod broke the slumber. The priests were married or lived in concubinage. Simony was freely exercised.
The Norman Conquest aroused England to new life and activity. It marks the greatest change in English history since the Anglo-Saxon Conquest. It left its impress upon the language, literature, architecture, laws and institutions of the country, without, however, breaking the continuity. The Normans, though a foreign, were yet a kindred race, of Teutonic stock, Romanized and Gallicanized in France. From savage pirates they had been changed into semi-civillized Christians, without losing their bravery and love of adventure, which they showed in the crusades and the con quest of England. They engrafted the French language and manners upon the Anglo-Saxon trunk, and superinduced an aristocratic element on the democratic base. It took a long time for the two nationalities and languages to melt into one.
The amalgamation was an enrichment. The happy com bination of Saxon strength and endurance with Norman enterprise and vivacity, in connection with the insular posi tion and the capacity for self-government fostered thereby,
1 It is said of the later Anglo-Saxon clergy that they were scarcely able to stammer out the forms of divine service, and that any one who knew " gram mar " was regarded as a prodigy.
84 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1085-1122.
prepared the English race for the dominion of the seas and the founding of successful colonies in all continents.1
The Norman kings were as jealous of their rights and as much opposed to papal superiority as the German emperors. Their instincts and interests were csesaropapistic or Erastian. But the Church kept them in check. The Hildebrandian ideas of reform were advocated and carried out in part by two of the most eminent scholars and monks of the age, Lanfranc (1005-1089) and Anselm (1033-1109), who fol lowed each other in the see of Canterbury. They were both of Italian birth, — one from the Lombard city of Pavia, the other from Aosta, — and successively abbots and teachers of the famous convent of Bee in the diocese of Rouen.
William I. of Normandy, surnamed "the Conqueror," the natural son of " Robert the Devil " and the daughter of a tanner, and the first king of the Norman dynasty (1066— 1087), enforced his pretension to the English throne under the consecrated banner of Pope Alexander II. by the defeat of Harold in the battle on the hill of Senlac, near Hastings, Oct. 14, 1066. Five years afterwards he made Lanfranc archbishop of Canterbury. He had formerly banished him from Normandy for opposing his marriage with Matilda of Flanders, as being within the forbidden degrees. He over took the abbot as he was leaving the convent on a lame horse, and hurried him on. The abbot said, " Give me a better horse, and I shall go faster." This cool request turned the duke's wrath into laughter and good-will. He was rec onciled, and employed him to obtain the pope's sanction of the marriage, and the removal of the interdict from his territories.
Lanfranc was a moderate Hildebrandian. He had been the chief promoter of the doctrine of transubstantiation in
1 On the effects of the Norman Conquest, see the fifth volume of Free man's great work. Comp. also Sehaffs essay on the cosmopolitan character and mission of the English language, in his Literature and Poetry, New York, 1890, pp. 1-62,