William would be king of a kingdom, head of a commonwealth, personal lord of every man in his realm, not merely, like a King of the French, external lord of princes whose subjects owed him no allegiance.This greatest monument of the Conqueror's statesmanship was carried into effect in a special assembly of the English nation gathered on the first day of August 1086 on the great plain of Salisbury.Now, perhaps for the first time, we get a distinct foreshadowing of Lords and Commons.The Witan, the great men of the realm, and "the landsitting men," the whole body of landowners, are now distinguished.The point is that William required the personal presence of every man whose personal allegiance he thought worth having.Every man in the mixed assembly, mixed indeed in race and speech, the King's own men and the men of other lords, took the oath and became the man of King William.On that day England became for ever a kingdom one and indivisible, which since that day no man has dreamed of parting asunder.
The great assembly of 1086 will come again among the events of William's later reign; it comes here as the last act of that general settlement which began in 1070.That settlement, besides its secular side, has also an ecclesiastical side of a somewhat different character.In both William's coming brought the island kingdom into a closer connexion with the continent; and brought a large displacement of Englishmen and a large promotion of strangers.
But on the ecclesiastical side, though the changes were less violent, there was a more marked beginning of a new state of things.
The religious missionary was more inclined to innovate than the military conqueror.Here William not only added but changed; on one point he even proclaimed that the existing law of England was bad.
Certainly the religious state of England was likely to displease churchmen from the mainland.The English Church, so directly the child of the Roman, was, for that very reason, less dependent on her parent.She was a free colony, not a conquered province.The English Church too was most distinctly national; no land came so near to that ideal state of things in which the Church is the nation on its religious side.Papal authority therefore was weaker in England than elsewhere, and a less careful line was drawn between spiritual and temporal things and jurisdictions.Two friendly powers could take liberties with each other.The national assemblies dealt with ecclesiastical as well as with temporal matters; one indeed among our ancient laws blames any assembly that did otherwise.Bishop and earl sat together in the local GEMOT, to deal with many matters which, according to continental ideas, should have been dealt with in separate courts.And, by what in continental eyes seemed a strange laxity of discipline, priests, bishops, members of capitular bodies, were often married.The English diocesan arrangements were unlike continental models.In Gaul, by a tradition of Roman date, the bishop was bishop of the city.His diocese was marked by the extent of the civil jurisdiction of the city.His home, his head church, his BISHOPSTOOL in the head church, were all in the city.In Teutonic England the bishop was commonly bishop, not of a city but of a tribe or district; his style was that of a tribe; his home, his head church, his bishopstool, might be anywhere within the territory of that tribe.Still, on the greatest point of all, matters in England were thoroughly to William's liking; nowhere did the King stand forth more distinctly as the Supreme Governor of the Church.In England, as in Normandy, the right of the sovereign to the investiture of ecclesiastical benefices was ancient and undisputed.
What Edward had freely done, William went on freely doing, and Hildebrand himself never ventured on a word of remonstrance against a power which he deemed so wrongful in the hands of his own sovereign.William had but to stand on the rights of his predecessors.When Gregory asked for homage for the crown which he had in some sort given, William answered indeed as an English king.
What the kings before him had done for or paid to the Roman see, that would he do and pay; but this no king before him had ever done, nor would he be the first to do it.But while William thus maintained the rights of his crown, he was willing and eager to do all that seemed needful for ecclesiastical reform.And the general result of his reform was to weaken the insular independence of England, to make her Church more like the other Churches of the West, and to increase the power of the Roman Bishop.
William had now a fellow-worker in his taste.The subtle spirit which had helped to win his kingdom was now at his side to help him to rule it.Within a few months after the taking of Chester Lanfranc sat on the throne of Augustine.As soon as the actual Conquest was over, William began to give his mind to ecclesiastical matters.It might look like sacrilege when he caused all the monasteries of England to be harried.But no harm was done to the monks or to their possessions.The holy houses were searched for the hoards which the rich men of England, fearing the new king, had laid up in the monastic treasuries.William looked on these hoards as part of the forfeited goods of rebels, and carried them off during the Lent of 1070.This done, he sat steadily down to the reform of the English Church.
