During the life of Hellouin, the abbey was twice levelled with the ground:  on each occasion it rose more splendid from its ruins, and on each the site was changed, till at length it was fixed upon the spot from which its ruins are now vanishing.  The whole of Normandy would scarcely furnish a more desirable situation.  Under the prelacy of Hellouin, Bec increased rapidly in celebrity, and consequently in the number of its inmates:  it was principally indebted for this increase to an accidental circumstance.  Lanfranc, a native of Pavia, a lawyer in Italy, but a monk in France, after having visited various monasteries, and distinguished himself by defending the doctrine of the real presence, then impugned by Berengarius, established himself here in the year 1042, and immediately opened a school, which, to judge from the language of Ordericus Vitalis[58], seems to have been the first ever known in Normandy.  Scholars from France, from England, and from Flanders, hastened to place themselves under his care; his fame, according to William of Malmesbury, went forth into the outer parts of the earth; and Bec, under his auspices, became a most celebrated resort of literature.  To borrow the more copious account given by William of Jumieges—­“report quickly spread the glory of Bec, and of its abbot, Hellouin, through every land.  The clergy, the sons of dukes, the most eminent schoolmasters, the most powerful of the laity, and the nobility, all hastened hither.  Many, actuated by love for Lanfranc, gave their lands to the convent.  The abbey was enriched with ornaments, with possessions, and with noble inmates.  Religion and learning increased; property of all kinds abounded; and the monks, who but a few years before, could scarcely command sufficient ground for the site of their own building, now saw their estates extend for many miles in a lengthening line.”—­Promotion followed the fame of Lanfranc, who soon became abbot of the royal monastery of St. Stephen, at Caen, and thence was translated to the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury.

It was the rare good fortune of Bec, that the abbey furnished two successive metropolitans to the English church, both of them selected for their erudition, Lanfranc and Anselm.  It is not a little remarkable, too, that both were Italians.  Lanfranc, whilst archbishop of Canterbury, presided in the year 1077, at the dedication of the third church built at Bec.  We may judge how far the abbey had at that time increased in consequence; for five bishops, one of them brother to the Conqueror, honored the ceremony with their presence; and the nobles and ladies of France, Normandy, and England crowded to the spot, to refresh their bodies by the pleasures of the festival, and their souls by endowments to the convent.