Foundations of the Anglican Church XI

Anselm of Bec

We left off in our last posting by mentioning that the accession of Norman Kings beginning with William the Conqueror and then his son, William Rufus, and grandson, Henry I marked a change in the relationship between the English Church and the See of Rome.  This change had two principle causes—the strong ties that the Normans themselves had with the Roman See even before they took the English throne and the Norman nomination of two successive Italian monks, Lanfranc and then Anselm, as Archbishops of Canterbury.  The shift in power from the Saxon Crown and prelates to Norman Kings and Italian primates anchored the English Church more in the continental tradition which was becoming increasingly papal dominated.   
The period during which first Lanfranc and then Anselm served as Archbishops of Canterbury (1070-1109) is marked by a concern for Church Reform.  This concern was not limited to England—far from it; this is the period of the Gregorian Reformation, named for the Italian monk and Church reformer, Hildebrand, who reigned as Pope Gregory VII. And very much in the tradition of the Gregorian Reform, Lanfranc, and even more Anselm, would struggle to free the Church from Crown control. 
The first issue to arise was a dispute over the refusal of Thomas of Bayeux as Archbishop-Elect of York to swear allegiance to Lanfranc as Primate of the English Church.  Thomas claimed that as an Archbishop himself he did not owe any submission to Canterbury.  The problem was that York had only one suffragen diocese—Durham—and Thomas needed three bishops to himself be consecrated.  As all the other bishops in England were suffragens of Canterbury, Lanfranc held the better hand.  Thomas could not be consecrated without Lanfranc’s authorization permitting two or more of is suffragens to help in the consecration, and Lanfranc would not grant it without Thomas taking an oath of submission to him.  Pope Alexander II told the two fighting prelates to resolve the matter in England.  Now Lanfranc could have used his influence with William the Conqueror to resolve the issue but did not want the Crown to get involved in making decisions for the Church.  This was a significant step away from royal control of the Church—a policy that would more or less guide the English Church over the next four and a half centuries until Thomas Cranmer would surrender the Church’s independence to Henry VIII.  Lanfranc convoked a synod at Winchester in 1071 under the presidency of a Papal Legate and that synod decided in Canterbury’s favor.  The Canterbury-York dispute merits an entry (or two or three) of its own and I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but continue on with a wider view of the tenures of Lanfranc and Anselm at Canterbury.
Both men were Church reformers and anxious to clearly delineate the lines of authority and in particular to assert some measure of independence of the English Church from the English Crown.  To do this they appealed for support to the papacy which was given because it fit the papal policy at the time to free the Church from outside governance.  The papacy itself was fighting for its freedom from the Imperial control of the Hohenstaufen Emperors.  But Lanfranc and Anselm were concerned about internal Church reform and not merely its freedom from outside influence.  Both archbishops tried to enforce celibacy on the secular clergy and to foster reform within the monastic establishments.  Success in either adventure was only relative but still not inconsiderable.  They also wanted to insure that men were chosen for bishops because of their suitability for that office and not because of political influence.  They wanted to protect church property from being seized by powerful landlords and to protect the clergy from coercion by feudal magnates.  Again, any Church reformation at the time needs to be looked at in terms of relative success but the health of the English Church improved in the thirty years these two men served as primates.  The decrease of royal and noble control over the Church was balanced by increased power of prelates and a growing influence of the papacy over the English Church

Foundations of the Anglican Church X

Ruins of Saint Augustine's Abbey,

Canterbury

Well, back to our saga of the Anglican Church and its relationship to the papacy.  In previous entries we saw how the Church of England has two roots—one in the primitive Christianity brought with the Roman legions and colonists in the second and third centuries, the other in the missionary efforts of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, a Roman monk sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 604 at the invitation of King Aethelberht of Kent’s invitation to Christianize the Anglo-Saxon Kentish people who had settled in England after the withdrawal of those Roman troops in the fifth century.  These two Churches—the older Church which survived mostly in the north and the younger Church which Augustine brought to the south had distinctly different customs and different relationships with the Roman See and its bishop.  The older Church of the north was certainly in communion with the Roman Church but also was quite independent of it.  With its own ancient traditions and under the influence of the Irish missionaries who strengthened it during the period of the Anglo-Saxon invasions it differed in many regards from the Roman Church and its practices.  To a great extent these differences were resolved with the synod of Whitby in 664, but the English Church retained many distinct customs and rites up until the second phase of the English Reformation in 1549.  The Roman Rite was never used in England which until the First (Protestant) Prayer Book of King Edward the Sixth in 1549 followed a variety of rites including those of Sarum, Durham, York, Lincoln, Hereford, and Bangor.  The southern tradition, that of Canterbury, had stronger ties to Rome due to its origins with Augustine and his mission but also followed the uniquely English rites just mentioned.  The ties of Canterbury to Rome were symbolized and strengthened by the sending of the pallium from the pope to each successive Archbishop—a practice that would continue until Matthew Parker’s consecration in 1559 under Elizabeth I. 
During the period of Anglo-Saxon Christianity the great devotion of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to Saint Peter the Apostle built and strengthened ties between Roman and English Christianity.  In order to forge ties to Rome with the northern Church and its more independent tradition, Pope Gregory III named Bishop Ecgbert of York an Archbishop in 735, raising York to metropolitan status and thus dependent on Rome for the archbishop’s pallium, as was Canterbury.  Nevertheless Archbishops of both Canterbury and York as well as the other English bishops were almost always elected independent of papal nomination and only appealed for recognition after their election and consecration.  That would later change and while they would still be elected independently of Rome, their consecration would not occur until after papal confirmation.   One exception where the Pope did appoint an Archbishop of Canterbury was when Archbishop Wighard died in 668 on a visit to Rome to receive his pallium and Pope Vitalian uses the opportunity to selected a Greek, Theodore of Tarsus, as the new Archbishop/primate for the English Church.   

The relationship of the English Church with the papacy was strengthened by William the Conqueror who in 1066 invaded England to claim the throne after the death of Edward the Confessor.  There were two claimants to the English Throne, the Anglo-Saxon Harold Godwinson and the Norman Duke, William the Bastard.   After William defeated Harold and secured the English throne, he replaced the Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand (who had supported Harold) with his own candidate, an Italian monk by the name of Lanfranc who had served as Abbot of Saint Étienne in Caen.  Lanfranc was succeeded in 1093 by another Italian, Anselm, abbot of Bec. To be fair, William waited three years from his conquest before sending Stigand into retirement but it was part of the Norman policy after the conquest to replace Saxons with Normans.   The Normans had strong ties to the papacy at this period—the Normans in Italy under Robert Guiscard were protecting Gregory VII from Emperor Henry IV in their dispute over the right of Emperors to invest prelates with the insignia of office.  Ironically William was fighting a variation of the same battle when it came to William of Saint Calais—his sometime rebel bishop of Durham.  That is a story for another time, suffice it to say now that with Normans on English throne and their Italian archbishops ensconced as primates, the relationship between the English Church (the Ecclesia Anglicana) and the papacy grew even stronger.  This is not to say that the Crown and Canterbury acted in concert—far from it.  William and his successors had strong intentions to control the Church in their realms and Lanfranc and Anselm both resisted royal authority and appealed to the Pope to back them up in their disputes with the Crown.  Such reliance on the papacy increased papal influence in England.  Tensions became particularly high under William’s son, William Rufus and Anselm ended up going into exile in 1097 and again in 1105 in disputes with William Rufus and later with William’s son, Henry I.  These conflicts were anticipatory of the debacle between Henry II and Thomas Becket later in the twelfth century but we will come to that matter down the line. Suffice it to say that with the replacement of an Anglo-Saxon hierarchy by a Norman hierarchy after the conquest, the relationship of the English Church to the papacy began to evolve from a relationship of ecclesial communion to the English Church becoming a client dependent on the Roman See.  It would be a long slow process and one with reverses, especially during the Avignon papacy of the fourteenth century, but throughout the one can see throughout the Plantagenet centuries a gradual loss of the ancient autonomy of the Anglican Church and its subjection to more control from Rome.  When the Plantagenets finally lost the Crown to the Tudors, this dependency would be challenged by new views of royal authority.          

The Investiture Controversy and William of Saint-Calais

Norman Portal of Durham Cathedral

This entrance may well date back to

the time of the episcopacy of William

of Saint-Calais

William of Saint-Calais was a monk of LeMans whom William the Conqueror named as Bishop of Durham in 1080.  Durham was a particularly important See—its position as the northernmost Diocese (and major city) in England rendered it key in the defense of the realm against the Scots.  In the eleventh and twelfth centuries—and indeed  into the fourteenth century—border skirmishes between the Scots and the English were common.  Durham’s position was so crucial that its bishop was not only a Lord Spiritual of the English Kingdom but a Count Palatine and as such is rather unique among the hierarchy having civil as well as ecclesiastical jurisdiction.  Indeed, the bishops of Durham, while technically counts, were “prince-bishops” in as that their "county palatine" was a principality, that is a semi-autonomous region governed by the Bishop/Count Palatine with vice-regal powers.  That is to say that as Count Palatine, the  Bishop exercised  his governmental power as the direct representative of the King.  While the crown had over the centuries endowed most dioceses with substantial lands to support a bishop, the cathedral, and other institutions, Durham was also invested with extensive lands to permit the Bishop/Count to defend the county and exercise the king’s governance and justice there.  In addition to revenue producing lands, the Bishop also held  several castles for the defense of the frontier with the Scots. 
     William of Saint-Calais served William the Conqueror well  but when he died he deserted the new King, William II, also known as William Rufus.  William Rufus was neither the man nor the king his father was.  When William the Conqueror died, he left his primary domain—the Duchy of Normandy—to his older son, Robert Curthose, and his (what he perceived to be) less important domain—England—to his second son, William.  Many of the nobles rose in rebellion against William Rufus in an effort to put Robert Curthose—the more talented son—on the throne of England as well as Normandy.  While Bishop William of Saint-Calais did not join in the rebellion, he supported it and did not come to the aid of William Rufus with troops as was his duty as a vassal to the king.  It was not a wise move.  William Rufus put down the rebellion, retained his throne, and brought the rebels—including the Bishop—to trial.  And here is where the story becomes interesting to us as we look at the issues of the Gregorian Reform. 
     The Bishop argued that he could not be tried in a secular court because he was a Bishop and thus could only be tried in an ecclesiastical court.  The King insisted that he was not being tried as a bishop, but as a vassal who had failed to perform his sworn duty of supplying aid and assistance to his liege lord, the King, in time of war.  The legal knot is that William was not only a bishop who was a vassal but was a vassal and held land and castles from the king precisely because he was a bishop.  In this particular case, even the Church (in the person of Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury) did not seek to protect William.  It was clear to them that he had failed, not as bishop but as vassal, but it highlights the complex relationship in which not only William but most bishops found themselves.  Their temporalities—the lands that supported them in their work and ministry (and comfortable, or more-than-comfortable, lifestyle) came from the King or Nobleman or Emperor in whose realm their diocese stood.  They were thus dependent on the civil ruler for their sustenance while they did God’s work. 
     It was customary for the king (or Emperor, or even a major nobleman) to invest his vassals when they received their fiefs.  In case of a secular noble this was not a problem.  It worked like this.  The Earl of Wessex died.  His heir came to the king, knelt before the king and placing his hands in the king’s hands, pledged to be a faithful vassal to his liege, the king.  The king then invested him with the earldom—the various signs and robes of authority.  The problem was with a bishop becoming a vassal.  The Archbishop of Bamberg dies.  The newly elected (by the Cathedral Chapter—the clergy attached to the Cathedral) Archbishop (and usually elected at the nomination of the Emperor) comes and kneels before the Emperor, pledging to serve him as vassal.    The Emperor then invests him with his symbols of office—in this case, ring, miter, crozier—and seats him in the Archbishop’s chair.  Hmmm.  It looks like the bishop is receiving his spiritual authority from the Emperor.  The Emperor—who understood himself to be the Vicar of Christ—didn’t have a problem with this.  But the pope did.  This leads to what we call the Investiture Controversy and it was the main issue of the Gregorian Reformation.