metropolitan church, but also by the brethren from the rival house of St. Augustine, with their new Abbot Scotland at their head.

Lanfranc.

In truth the English Church might feel honoured by receiving for its head such a man as Lanfranc, renowned throughout Christendom as the most learned and Early life of brilliant scholar of his time; and if he was not strictly a saint, the purity of his life and sincerity of his devotion had never been questioned. He was a native of Pavia, born about 1005, the son of a lawyer who held some municipal office in the city. The Lombard cities, although absorbed into the Roman Empire, maintained a large amount of independence; they were practically self-governing communities, and the old civil law of Rome survived as at least the groundwork of their internal administration. The study of jurisprudence was an important part of a good education, and Lanfranc made great proficiency in this branch of learning. By one writer indeed (Robertus de Monte) he is credited with having shared with Irnerius the discovery of the Roman law books, and this story, although chronologically impossible, is an evidence of the high reputation which he had aquired for legal learning. In the law courts he is said to have proved himself more than a match for the most experienced advocate in eloquence and forensic skill.

What induced him to throw up the prospect of a successful and lucrative profession at Pavia, and seek a new career in France, can only be conjectured. There seems, however, to have been a great demand for learned men at this epoch north of the Alps, and a more promising opening for them than in Italy. The progress of science and civilisation had been checked in Italy since the ninth century by the petty wars between local rulers, the exhausting invasions of the German Emperor in the north, and the harassing attacks of the Saracens in the south. Some reformation of the Church had been effected in the latter part of the tenth century, when learning and piety ascended the papal throne in the person of Gerbert as Sylvester II.; but during the first forty years of the eleventh century, when the popes became the nominees, generally the simoniacal nominees, of the Counts of Tusculum, it had sunk back into the depths

II

CONDITION OF NORMANDY

21

of degradation and corruption. In France, on the other hand, the intellectual movement which had begun in the days of the Emperor Charles the Great, although impeded in the tenth century by internal strifes and barbarian incursions, had now received a fresh impulse. The reformation of monastic life originating at Cluny and Avrille, where Gerbert had been trained, was spreading in all directions. Many old schools of learning in connection with monastic houses were resuscitated, and new ones were created. There were schools at Lyons, at Toul, at Metz, at Verdun, at Chartres, at Reims, at Cambrai, to which students flocked from all parts of Christendom.

Normandy

It was probably about the year 1039 that Lanfranc (being then thirty-four or thirty-five years of age) took his journey into France accompanied by a few young men of noble family, his pupils perhaps in the study of law. His arrival in He made for Normandy under the persuasion that it afforded the most promising opening to fame and wealth. There had been great lack of learning and culture there since the settlement of the Northmen. But wherever the Normans conquered and settled they exhibited a wonderful capacity for adopting the language, the arts, and the religion of the people whom they subdued. They lost none of their own vigour, and imparted some of it to the people with whom they mingled. So it was in that part of France to which they gave their name. So it was at a later date in Sicily and in England. None became more loyal sons of the Church than the descendants of the heathen Rollo, none more enthusiastic crusaders, none more active in founding churches and monastic houses, or more bountiful in bestowing gifts upon them. In the first half of the eleventh century a kind of passion for the foundation of churches and monasteries animated the leading men in Normandy. "Every nobleman," says Orderic Vitalis, "deemed himself contemptible if he did not support clergy or monks on his property." "All noblemen," says William of Jumieges, "vied with one another in building churches on their estates, and enriching the monks who offered prayers to God on their behalf." The shrewd and sagacious mind of Lanfranc may have discerned in the Normans the coming people of the age,strong, receptive, capable of unlimited development; and not long after his arrival in Normandy the wonderful courage and

skill with which the young Duke William crushed rebellion and made himself master of his land and his people marked him out as destined for a great career.

On his arrival in Normandy Lanfranc took up his abode at Avranches, and either taught in some existing school or

at Avranches.

established one for himself. In days when copies His school of books were necessarily rare and costly the professor who had mastered certain branches of learning was to students what a standard book is to us: the authority which every one quoted, and to which every one had recourse. If he conveyed his knowledge in clear and eloquent language his lecture room was crowded, and he became the object of enthusiastic veneration.

So it was with Lanfranc. In two years he had acquired a great reputation, and scholars flocked to him from all parts of Europe, many of them from Italy. The principal subjects that he taught were probably dialectic, rhetoric, and theology. The study of the Roman civil law could not have been much needed in Normandy, where disputes would be settled in accordance with customary law not derived from Roman sources. Nevertheless, Roman law had probably a place amongst the subjects taught by Lanfranc, for the great canonist Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, was his pupil.

Devout study of the New Testament led him to form a momentous resolution. He conceived that the only way to

to Bec.

obey the command of Christ, "if any one will come His removal after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me," was utterly to renounce the world and devote himself to prayer, meditation, and study in some solitary retreat. So he set out one day with a single companion, Paul (afterwards Abbot of St. Alban's), not knowing whither he went. They were overtaken by night in the forest of Ouche, and fell into the hands of robbers, who after stripping him of such things as he had with him, left him bound to a tree with his hands behind his back and his cloak tilted over his face. In the silence of the night he lifted up his soul to God and tried to say the office of lauds, but found to his dismay that he could not remember it. In the midst of his avocations as a student and teacher, he had not found leisure before to go through the office. Horrified at the discovery of

II

LANFRANC AT BEC

Origin of the house

at Bec.

23

his ignorance, he now renewed his vow that if he escaped from his present peril he would dedicate himself wholly to God's service. At dawn his cries for help attracted the notice of some wayfarers, who released him. He begged them to show him the way to the humblest monastery in the neighbourhood, and they directed him to a house which they said a man of God was then building at Bec. The man of God was Herluin. As a vassal of Gilbert, Count of Brionne, he had been distinguished for courage and skill in arms. At the age of thirty-seven he narrowly escaped capture or death in a battle in which his lord was defeated, and he resolved henceforth to devote himself to the service of God. He withdrew entirely from the little court of Count Gilbert, and having spent much time in prayer and meditation he determined, about the year 1034, to plant a monastery on his own little estate of Burneville. His means were small, but he laboured with his own hands in digging the foundations, carrying the building materials, and erecting the walls. He could find no one willing to be head of so poor a house, so he was ordained priest and became his own abbot. At the end of five years he was compelled to shift his little monastery owing to dearth of water, and built a new house and church at the confluence of the river Risle and a brook, whence the spot received the name of Bec. At the age of forty he had begun to learn how to read, and after spending his days in manual toil he would devote his evenings to study. The men who joined monastic brotherhoods in those rude days were often coarse, passionate, ignorant,—a curious mixture of simple childlike piety and barbaric violence. He felt him

self unequal to the task of training and educating such wild undisciplined natures. He often prayed that God would send him a man who would aid him in the government of his house; and Lanfranc was the answer to that prayer.

Herluin was engaged in building an oven when Lanfranc presented himself and signified his wish to become a monk. The book of the rule was sent for; Lanfranc declared his willingness to submit to it; the scholar and Arrival of professor put on the monk's frock, and made his humble profession of obedience to the simple-minded, unlearned soldier who presided over the house.

Lanfranc.

Each could admire and respect the good qualities of the other, and a warm and lasting friendship sprang up between them. Lanfranc was a perfect pattern of submission to monastic discipline. On one occasion when it fell to his lot to read to the brethren in the refectory during dinner, the prior, who was an illiterate man, corrected him for making the penultimate syllable in "docere" long. Lanfranc repeated the word as the prior directed it to be pronounced, with the wrong quantity, considering, as his biographer observes, that obedience was better than prosody. Although Lanfranc devoted the greater part of his time to study, the abbot found his knowledge of law and secular business of much value in administering the affairs of the monastery. He was in fact a thoroughly practical man, who did not neglect the smallest details of household management. But the conduct of some

of the brethren: their coarseness, and indolence, and negligence of the rules, so disgusted him, that he seriously thought of retreating to a hermitage; and with this view he began to train himself for the life of a recluse by feeding on roots and berries. At the earnest entreaty, however, of his abbot he abandoned this intention, and soon afterwards Herluin made

prior.

him prior. His appointment to this office was the He is made turning-point in the history of Bec. It was the origin of a school which became renowned throughout Europe. With Lanfranc science entered the monastery, and together with science, piety and strict discipline. Two schools were connected with the house, one for children dedicated to the monastic life, another for those who were intended to become secular clerks, or who were not destined for any clerical office. Pupils soon flocked to this school from Flanders, Brittany, Gascony, and all parts of France. The crowd outgrew the buildings: the situation of the house was not healthy, and it was removed to a new site, but the cost of the new buildings was easily covered by liberal offerings of land and money. The dream of Herluin was fulfilled, in which he had seen a fountain of water spring out at the bottom of the valley, which rose until it overflowed the hills and flooded the surrounding plains.

From the days of Lanfranc for more than a century and