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Egelwin, Bishop of Durham, was sent to Abingdon, where within a few months he died of hunger, either voluntary or enforced; while Archbishop Stigand was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. xxiii Lanfranc. This noted ecclesiastic was a native of Pavia; he was bred up to the law, and, coming to France, established a school at Avranches, which was attended by pupils of the highest rank.
When Henry I. came to the throne, he appointed Theobald, a feeble but good man, to the See of Canterbury, less ambitious than Lanfranc, more inoffensive than Anselm; a Norman disinclined to quarrel with his sovereign.
"We know that, good chaplain," quoth William, impatiently. He had enough of that language from Lanfranc himself; and, moreover, was thinking more of the Isle of Ely than of the celibacy of the clergy. "Well, Sir Dade?" "So they have got together all their kin; for among these monks every one is kin to a Thane, or Knight, or even an Earl.
When Anselm had remonstrated with the king on the eve of his Norman expedition, about the vacant abbeys that were in his hands, William in anger had replied that Lanfranc would never have dared to use such language to his father.
Lanfranc has many other expressions that one is tempted to quote, because they show a thinking surgeon of the old time, anticipating many supposedly modern ideas and conclusions. He is a particular favorite of Gurlt's, who has more than twenty-five large octavo, closely printed pages with regard to him.
The secular chapters could be refractory, but the disputes between them and their bishops were mainly of local importance; they form no such part of the general story of ecclesiastical and papal advance as the long tale of the quarrel between the archbishops and the monks of Christ Church. Lanfranc survived William, and placed the crown on the head of his successor.
The whole duchy named Lanfranc as his successor; but he declined the post, and was himself sent to Rome to bring the pallium for the new archbishop John, a kinsman of the ducal house. Lanfranc doubtless refused the see of Rouen only because he was designed for a yet greater post in England; the subtlest diplomatist in Europe was not sent to Rome merely to ask for the pallium for Archbishop John.
When Lanfranc had been sent to the Pope by William with a view to making some arrangement by which the King could retain his wife Matilda and at the same time the good offices of the Church, his side of the bargain consisted in undertaking to build two great abbeys at Caen, one for men and one for women.
It was William's combined wisdom and good luck to provide himself with a counsellor than whom for his immediate purposes none could be better. A man either of a higher or a lower moral level than Lanfranc, a saint like Anselm or one of the mere worldly bishops of the time, would not have done his work so well.
Lanfranc was sent to Rome to obtain the pallium for the new archbishop, but his mission was in all probability one of information to the pope regarding larger interests than those of the archbishopric of Rouen. In the meantime, affairs had not run smoothly in England.
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