The Archbishop of Canterbury had been a great personage under the Saxon kings.  Dunstan ruled England as the prime minister of Edward the Martyr, but his influence would have been nearly as great had he been merely primate of the Church.  Nor was the power of the archbishop reduced by the Norman kings.  William the Conqueror might have made the spiritual authority subordinate to the temporal, if he had followed his inclinations.  But he dared not quarrel with the Pope,—­the great Hildebrand, by whose favor he was unmolested in the conquest of the Saxons.  He was on very intimate terms of friendship with Lanfranc, whom he made Archbishop of Canterbury,—­a wily and ambitious Italian, who was devoted to the See of Rome and his spiritual monarch.  The influence of Hildebrand and Lanfranc combined was too great to be resisted.  Nor did he attempt resistance; he acquiesced in the necessity of making a king of Canterbury.  His mind was so deeply absorbed with his conquest and other state matters that he did not seem to comprehend the difficulties which might arise under his successors, in yielding so much power to the primate.  Moreover Lanfranc, in the quiet enjoyment of his ecclesiastical privileges, gave his powerful assistance in imposing the Norman yoke.  He filled the great sees with Norman prelates.  He does not seem to have had much sympathy with the Saxons, or their bishops, who were not so refined or intellectual as the bishops of France.  The Normans were a superior race to the Saxons in executive ability and military enthusiasm.  The chivalric element of English society, among the higher classes, came from the Normans, not from the Saxons.  In piety, in passive virtues, in sustained industry, in patient toil, in love of personal freedom, the Saxons doubtless furnished a finer material for the basis of an agricultural, industrial, and commercial nation.  The sturdy yeomen of England were Saxons:  the noble and great administrators were Normans.  In pride, in ambition, and in executive ability the Normans bore a closer resemblance to the old heroic Romans than did the Saxons.

The next archbishop after Lanfranc was Anselm, appointed by William Rufus.  Anselm was a great scholar, the profoundest of the early Schoolmen; a man of meditative habits, who it was presumed would not interfere with royal encroachments.  William Rufus never dreamed that the austere and learned monk, who had spent most of his days in the abbey of Bec in devout meditations and scholastic inquiries, would interfere with his rapacity.  But, as we have already seen, Anselm was conscientious, and became the champion of the high-church party in the West.  He occupied two distinct spheres,—­he was absorbed in philosophical speculations, yet took an interest in all mundane questions.  His resolve to oppose the king’s usurpations in the spiritual realm caused the bitter quarrel already described, which ended in a compromise.