to make England less of another world.  On the other hand, one insular peculiarity well served the purposes of the new primate.  Monastic chapters in episcopal churches were almost unknown out of England.  Lanfranc, himself a monk, favoured monks in this matter also.  In several churches the secular canons were displaced by monks.  The corporate spirit of the regulars, and their dependence on Rome, was far stronger than that of the secular clergy.  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 friendship between king and archbishop remained unbroken through their joint lives.  Lanfranc’s acts were William’s acts; what the Primate did must have been approved by the King.  How far William’s acts were Lanfranc’s acts it is less easy to say.  But the Archbishop was ever a trusted minister, and a trusted counsellor, and in the King’s frequent absences from England, he often acted as his lieutenant.  We do not find him actually taking a part in warfare, but he duly reports military successes to his sovereign.  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.  William needed an ecclesiastical statesman, neither unscrupulous nor over-scrupulous, and he found him in the lawyer of Pavia, the doctor of Avranches, the monk of Bec, the abbot of Saint Stephen’s.  If Lanfranc sometimes unwittingly outwitted both his master and himself, if his policy served the purposes of Rome more than suited the purposes of either, that is the common course of human affairs.  Great men are apt to forget that systems which they can work themselves cannot be worked by smaller men.  From this error neither William nor Lanfranc was free.  But, from their own point of view, it was their only error.  Their work was to subdue England, soul and body; and they subdued it.  That work could not be done without great wrong:  but no other two men of that day could have done it with so little wrong.  The shrinking from needless and violent change which is so strongly characteristic of William, and less strongly of Lanfranc also, made their work at the time easier to be done; in the course of ages it made it easier to be undone.

CHAPTER X—­THE REVOLTS AGAINST WILLIAM—­1070-1086