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Updated: April 30, 2025
Lanfranc persuaded William to abolish it, but the rude Saxon slave-merchants cared nothing for his edicts, until the Bishop of Worcester came to Bristol, and preached against the traffic, staying a month or two at a time, every year, till the minds of the people of Bristol were so altered, that they not only gave up the trade, but acquired such a horror of it that they tore out the eyes of the last person who persisted in it.
A new Archbishop of York, Thomas, Canon of Bayeux, was appointed, and three bishops, Winchester, Selsey, and Elmham, all of these from the royal chapel. But the most important appointment of the time was that of Lanfranc, Abbot of St. Stephen's at Caen, to be Archbishop of Canterbury.
William demanded that his bishopric should be restored to him before he was compelled to answer, referring to the seizing of his temporalities by the king. Lanfranc replied that he had not been deprived of his bishopric. He refused to plead, however, until the point had been formally decided, and on the decision of the court against him, he demanded the canonical grounds on which they had acted.
"Nay; he caught me and shut me in the womb of the earth, but by God's grace I escaped him but this matters not. Give me your good aid to the duke, that in all haste I may return with a great host to save the brethren." "How old art thou, my son?" asked Lanfranc. "Father, but sixteen years," said I, as though I feared they might smile at me.
Consequently no question of the lawfulness of investiture was mooted during his lifetime. Gregory contented himself with threats against Lanfranc.
Lanfranc had been followed in his abbey at Bec by the most famous of his scholars, Anselm of Aosta, an Italian like himself. Friends as they were, no two men could be more strangely unlike. Anselm had grown to manhood in the quiet solitude of his mountain-valley, a tenderhearted poet-dreamer, with a soul pure as the Alpine snows above him, and an intelligence keen and clear as the mountain-air.
To lay waste the lands of Bec for the rebuke of Lanfranc was like an ordinary prince of the time; it was unlike William, if he had not been stirred up by a censure which touched his wife as well as himself. But above all, the bargain between William and Lanfranc is characteristic of the man and the age. Lanfranc goes to Rome to support a marriage which he had censured in Normandy.
It was a Benedictine abbey, as severe in its rules as that of Clairvaux. Lanfranc cordially welcomed his fellow-countryman, then at the age of twenty-six, to his retreat; and on his removal three years afterwards to the more princely abbey of St. Stephen in Caen, Anselm succeeded him as prior.
We cannot doubt the opinion expressed by more than one of the writers of the next reign, that a great change for the worse took place in the actions of the king after the death of Lanfranc.
Lanfranc, himself an Italian, had been exiled from his native country, apparently because of political troubles, but was welcomed at Paris because the faculty realized that they needed the inspiration of the Italian medical movement in surgery for the establishment of a good school of surgery in connection with the university.
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