Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/299

 LANFRANC 283 there is some reason to believe happened about this time ; but, however it may have been occasioned, the fact that a man of his energy and strength of will should, although somewhat late in life, have transferred himself to a career which not only was universally supposed to involve great spiritual advantages, but must also have been seen to offer a peculiarly favourable field for the exercise of his special talents and acquirements, need cause no surprise. After a lengthened novitiate of ascetic humiliation and seclusion in the Benedictine monastery of Bee, then under the presidency of abbot Herluin, Lanfranc was at last called upon to resume the work of teaching ; his fame speedily attracted numerous pupils, and it became necessary to enlarge the conventual buildings. He now became prior, with full control of the internal discipline of the establishment (1046). Among those who became his pupils about this time are mentioned Witmund (afterwards bishop of Aversa), Anselm of Aosta (afterwards of Canterbury), and Anselm of Lucca (after wards Pope Alexander II.). It was during his priorship at Bee that Lanfranc began to figure somewhat prominently in the eucharistic controversy associated with the name of Berengarius of Tours. This able but unfortunate contro versialist, while maintaining the doctrine of a real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, had denied that presence to be one of essence, or the change effected to be one of sub stance. In doing so he had placed himself in an attitude of opposition not so much to the lately formulated theory of Paschasius Radbertus as to the entire current of ecclesiastical opinion then prevalent. The earliest extant letter of Berengarius to Lanfranc implies a previous friend ship, but is written in a tone of remonstrance, beseeching the latter not to treat as heretics those who had Scripture on their side and could also claim the support of Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome. It is to be regretted that we are not in possession of more of the correspondence, and especially that we are left entirely to conjecture with regard to the circumstances which occasioned it. It seems to have been somewhat compromising to Lanfranc, for at the Easter synod held at Rome in 1050, which he had been summoned to attend, the prior of Bee was, after the con demnation of the absent Berengarius, called upon to vindicate his own orthodoxy by a public confession of his faith. He had no difficulty, however, in thus purging himself of all suspicion of heretical pravity, and was after wards present in September, by special request, at the synod of Vercelli, where Berengarius, again absent, was excommunicated. A personal controversy was renewed by Berengarius from time to time, but, so far as we know, Lan franc s share in it came to an end with the composition (probably some time between 1063 and 1069) of his Liber de Corpore et Sanguine Domini Nostri contra Berengarium. Other events of much more exciting and absorbing personal interest to him had meanwhile intervened. In 1053 William of Normandy, in spite of the express prohibition of the council of Rheims (1049), had married his cousin Matilda, daughter of Baldwin, duke of Flanders, a defiance of ecclesiastical authority which involved the highest ecclesiastical censures. The now powerful prior of Bee, was not slow to express his condemnation, which he further accentuated by his contemptuous treatment of Ilerfast, the duke s chaplain, who had been sent on some errand of conciliation. Peremptorily ordered to leave the duchy, Lanfranc, when setting out on his journey into exile on an excessively lame horse, whether by accident or design came across the path of William ; some genial touch of humanity and good humour suddenly converted them (such is the import of the Chronicles) into firm friends; the prior accompanied the duke to his castle, and shortly afterwards undertook a mission to Rome for a papal dispensation which should legalize the obnoxious marriage. This was obtained in 1059; Lan franc s influence with William and Matilda steadily increased, and soon the abbeys of St Stephen and of the Holy Trinity at Caen part of the price of the papal grace began to rise. In 1062 the former building was sufficiently far advanced to be fit for use, and, at the urgent request of the founder, Lanfranc became its first abbot. In this position he was one of the most intimate advisers of William during the anxious times which immediately preceded and followed the Conquest. Already destined for the more splendid if more arduous see of Canterbury, he, doubtless with the royal approval, declined that of Rouen, which had been put within his reach in 1067. In 1070 he was, at the Whitsungemot held at Windsor, chosen to the primacy of England, vacant by the deposition of Stigand; and, at a synod in Normandy where the legates of the pope were present, he was constrained to accept, vainly pleading &quot; his weakness and unworthiness, his ignorance of a foreign tongue, and the barbarism of the nations he was thus com pelled to visit.&quot; His consecration took place on Angus&quot; 29, 1070, in a temporary structure raised on the site of the cathedral which had been destroyed by fire three years before; and in the following year he went to Rome to receive the pallium from his former pupil Alexander II. The pope received him with great cordiality, giving him a second pallium for old friendship s sake ; but he did not thereby succeed in attaching the new archbishop to the ultramontane policy ; during the nineteen years of the- primacy of the brilliant Lombard it became ever more apparent that neither Hildebrand s, nor Lanfranc s, but William s was the master mind in England. Lanfranc ably seconded the Conqueror in the line of action which resulted in the subordination of York to Canterbury, and also in the gradual removal from power of all English prelates and abbots, and their replacement by foreigners, until at last Wolfstan of Worcester was the only Anglo-Saxon left ways to denationalize the English Church, and bring it into closer relation with the central authority at Rome, any such tendency was more than counterbalanced by the legislation, also supported by Lanfranc, which placed the royal supremacy on a footing which it had never before attained. Thus it was enacted that bishops, like barons, were to pay homage to the crown, and the clergy were to acknowledge no one as pope until the royal consent had first been obtained ; that no letters from Rome were to be published till approved by the king ; that no council was to pass laws or canons except such as should be agreeable to the king s pleasure ; that no bishop was to implead or punish any of the king s vassals without the king s pre cept; and that no ecclesiastic was to leave the country with out leave obtained. As regarded church discipline the Hildebrandine reforms were followed, but with wisdom and moderation ; thus strict regulations against simony were enforced, but with respect to clerical celibacy a distinction was drawn between the parochial and the capitular clergy, the former being permitted to retain their wives. A striking illustration of the recognized ecclesias tical independence of England under William and his able minister is furnished in the fact that, in the very year (1076) of the synod of Winchester at which so important a modification of the decrees of a Roman council had been resolved on, Lanfranc along with Thomas of York and Remigius of Dorchester presented themselves at the holy see in a mission from the king to seek a confirmation of certain ancient privileges, and that they were successful in their application. No less eloquent is the fact that, after William s rejection of Gregory s demand for his homage, Lanfranc had the courage to refuse the papal summons to appear at the threshold of the apostles. After his return
 * undisturbed ; but, if these measures were fitted in some