by Marc Morris
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.13
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.14
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.15
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.16
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’.17
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.18
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.19
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 i
nstead 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.20
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.21
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.22
In one crucial respect, however, the Normans deliberately spurned the linguistic tradition they encountered. As we’ve already noted, English was highly unusual in being a written as well as spoken language. In England, not only were books and chronicles composed in the vernacular; so too were official documents – the charters, writs and diplomas issued in the name of the king. But in or around 1070 the use of English for such documents suddenly ceased. This must have been a decision taken at the highest level, and the coincidence of its timing with the arrival of Lanfranc might lead us to identify him as the prime suspect. That said, the purge of the Church hierarchy that same year, along with the steady attrition of English secular officials, must have made the abandonment of written English a fairly obvious development: what, after all, would have been the point of addressing orders to Continental newcomers in words they could not understand? From 1070 onwards, therefore, all royal documents were written in Latin, a language that was familiar to both literate Normans and educated Englishmen. Nevertheless, even if it was a necessary switch, it was a switch that had been rendered necessary by the fact of the Conquest, and may therefore still have been perceived by many Englishmen as yet another attack on their native culture.23
Such cultural attacks, real or imagined, could lead to tension which spilled over into violence. The most notorious example occurred at Glastonbury in 1083, when the new Norman abbot, Thurstan, fell out with his monks over a number of matters (among other things, he insisted that they abandon their accustomed Gregorian chant in favour of the version used at Fécamp). Eventually the argument escalated to such an extent that Thurstan tried to silence his critics by sending in a group of armed knights. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, normally so laconic, in this case lamented at length:
The Frenchmen broke into the choir and threw missiles towards the altar where the monks were, and some of the knights went to the upper storey and shot arrows down towards the shrine, so that many arrows stuck in the cross that stood above the altar: and the wretched monks were lying round the altar, and some crept under it, and cried to God zealously, asking for His mercy when they could get no mercy from men. What can we say, except that they shot fiercely, and the others broke down the doors there, and went in and killed some of the monks and wounded many there in the church, so that the blood came from the altar on to the steps, and from the steps on to the floor. Three were killed there and eighteen wounded.
This was clearly an extreme episode in every sense: the king himself intervened and Thurstan was sent back to Normandy in disgrace.24 Yet there are other recorded instances of similar discord, albeit less violent, between English monks and their Norman masters. A letter from Lanfranc to Adelelm, the unpopular abbot of Abingdon, refers to an unspecified row that had caused several of the brothers to abscond, and implies that the disagreement was partly Adelelm’s own fault. Meanwhile Lanfranc himself at one time clashed with the monks of St Augustine’s over their refusal to accept the rule of a new French abbot. To reduce the rebels to obedience, the archbishop imprisoned some of them in chains, but even this was not enough for one especially obdurate individual. ‘Would you kill your abbot?’ asked Lanfranc. ‘Certainly I would if I could,’ replied the monk – an answer which resulted in him being tied naked to the abbey door, whipped in view of the people and driven from the city.25
That exchange exposes one of the great fears for the Normans immediately after the Conquest – that Englishmen, given half the chance, would surreptitiously slaughter them the moment their backs were turned. That much is made clear by a new law introduced by William, known as ‘murdrum’, to deal with precisely such circumstances. By this law, if a Norman was found murdered, the onus was placed on the lord of the murderer to produce him within five days or face a ruinous fine. If the culprit remained at large despite his lord’s financial ruin, the penalty was simply transferred to the local community as a whole, and levied until such time as the murderer was produced. Clearly the aim was to deter both lords and communities from granting protection and anonymity to such killers, and the obvious inference is that this is exactly what they had been doing. The murdrum fine conjures the vivid picture of Englishmen up and down the country, frustrated by the failure of the major rebellions, continuing to vent their anger against their Norman occupiers by picking them off individually whenever the opportunity presented itself.26
Writing to Alexander II in the early part of 1073, Lanfranc described the situation in England as unbearably awful. ‘I am continually hearing, seeing and experiencing so much unrest among different people, such distress and injuries, such hardness of heart, greed and dishonesty, such a decline in the Holy Church, that I am weary of my life, and grieve exceedingly to have lived in times like these.’ It is notable that, in describing England’s woes, the archbishop does not seek to apportion blame between the English or the Normans. As his letters show, Lanfranc was not afraid to upbraid Frenchmen if he
felt they had strayed from the path of righteousness. The bishop of Thetford received a stern admonition to curb his licentious lifestyle, while the bishop of Chester was severely criticized for his harassment of the monks of Coventry. Lanfranc’s correspondence with the bishop of Rochester, meanwhile, shows the Normans in a poor light when it refers to the problem of Englishwomen who had fled to nunneries ‘not for love of the religious life but for fear of the French’ – a line that rubbishes William of Poitiers’ glib assertion that during the Conquest ‘women were safe from the violence which passionate men often inflict’, and proves that Orderic Vitalis had been right to speak of Norman rape.27
Nevertheless, it seems likely that, in one important respect, the archbishop probably did see the English as more culpable than their conquerors. The problem with Englishmen was not just that they killed Normans on the quiet when no one was looking; it was also that they frequently resorted to killing each other. There was a long tradition in England of solving political problems or family disputes by resorting to murder. Confining ourselves to only eleventh-century examples, we could point to the purges that had been carried out at the court of King Æthelred, or the aristocratic bloodbath that had attended the accession of King Cnut. Earl Godwine had famously killed Edward the Confessor’s brother, Alfred, Earl Siward had arranged the murder of his rival, Eadwulf, and Tostig had similarly ordered the deaths of his Northumbrian enemies. Even Godwine’s daughter, Queen Edith, was said to have contrived the assassination of her brother’s bête noire, Gospatric, when he was staying peacefully at her husband’s court. Monastic chroniclers may have bewailed such behaviour, but it was clear that secular society tolerated it as a usual and useful part of the political process.28