Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/631

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further anathemas against the invaders of ecclesiastical rights, against the unlawful occupiers of Church lands, against laymen who claimed to have a right in tithes and other Church dues, the synod uses a formula which shows how keenly Normandy felt the difference between the great William and his eldest son. What the days of the Confessor were in England, the days of the Conqueror were in his own duchy. The synod decreed that all churches should enjoy their goods and customs as they had been in the time of King William, and that no burthens should be laid upon them but such as King William had allowed.

It would be too much to think that William the Red at once brought back the Norman duchy to the state in which it had been in those golden days of William the Great. And it is still less needful to stop to prove that even the days of William the Great would not have seemed golden days as compared with the state of any well-governed land in our own time. But there can be no doubt that the coming of the new ruler wrought a real reform. And a reform was grievously needed. We read that very little came of the well-intentioned decrees of the synod. The bishops, Odo among them, did what they could—it is Odo's last recorded act in the lands with which we have to deal, and it is something that he leaves us in the shape of a reformer and not in that of an oppressor. But very little came of the efforts of the prelates. The Duke did nothing to help them—his mind was perhaps too full of the crusade—and things were at the moment of William's coming in almost greater confusion than

et nostra prohibemus ut nulla Christianitas fiat in terris dominorum illorum."]
 * [Footnote: domini qui amodo eos retinuerint in castris suis. Et auctoritate apostolica