this time might be different. But, as it was, the very appeal of Anselm to the Pope brought out the fact that it was after all in England, and not at Rome, under Anselm, and not under Urban, that the battle of the English people against tyranny and corruption must be fought and won. It is indeed a pathetic outburst in which Eadmer chronicles the first despair with which the monks discovered the hollowness of their ideal. 'Alas! what shall we say,' say they, 'if Rome prefers gold and silver to justice? what help, what counsel, what comfort shall they hereafter find in their oppression who have nothing to give by which to gain justice for their cause?'1

But

'To know what' they had not to trust to
Was worth all the ashes and dust too,'

since at home they could find leaders whom they could safely trust and might boldly follow?

From the foregoing pages it will be seen what I conceive to be the work which Anselm did for England.

First, he raised up a power in the State which, though strong before the Conquest, had first lost

1 Hist. Nov., Book II. p. 32.

its purity by success, and then its vigour by the desertion of its leaders. He gave a centre of strength for the nation, unconnected with the Norman kings, and which those kings at first affected to despise. He connected this in a mysterious way with a foreign power, and thereby showed the kings the hopelessness of attempting to crush it when their contempt should change into anger. Yet, secondly, while he thus seemed to rest for support on a foreign power, he was appealing specially to that part of the Church which clung most to traditions of national saints, and by his own heroic life was cherishing the hope of the increase of that glorious body. Lastly, in a special and definite sense, he connected the cause of the freedom of the Church with the freedom of the English people. Concerned as the charter of Henry I. was in its most practical and definite concessions rather with the Norman nobles and their immediate dependents than with the English people, and useless as it was for any immediate results, since it depended for its observance on the mere will of the sovereign, it yet contained two clauses afterwards to become very memorable, and which gave a clear sign of the tendency of

Anselm's work. Henry thereby promised not to sell or farm Church property, and to support the liberties of the Church, and he promised also to restore the laws of King Edward.' Vague as the latter promise was, and dangerous as the former might come to be, there was a hint in this union of good hope for England. The phrase 'the liberty of the Church' might be tortured into meaning the freedom of the clergy from law. The struggle for the cause of the Church might sink into a mere wrangle for local privileges; but the life of Anselm remained as a witness that both had once had a nobler meaning, and the life of Langton will show that that witness was not in vain.

For the present, however, I have to show how the power which Anselm had called forth and ennobled became corrupted after his death, till it was necessary that England should look elsewhere for help in her onward progress. To some, indeed, it may appear that Anselm's own work became

1 How little this promise was kept in any sense understood by the people may be gathered from the application of the Londoners to Matilda after her victory over Stephen, 'ut leges eis regis Edwardi observare liceret quia optimæ erant, non patris sui Henrici quia graves erant.'-Continuatio Chronici Florentii Wigorniensis, P. 132, ed. Luard.

less noble in his latter years, and that the contest about investitures, when carried on with Henry I., was unworthy of the prophet who had stood forth to denounce the awful corruption of the reign of Rufus. I cannot, and will not, believe it. Henry Beauclerc was a plausible and cunning man, opposed to excess, and ready to live up to an average standard of respectability, both in private and public. He drove Ralph of Durham and such men as he from the Court, but he was not faithful to his wife. He began by repealing unjust exactions, but he ended by laying on heavier ones for his own pleasures. He made concessions in his charter, but his love of hunting was too strong to allow relaxation of the forest laws.1 Such a man was not likely to strike strongly at the evils against which Anselm's efforts were specially directed, and it is clear that, till within a short time before Anselm's death, his struggle against the King for papal investitures, and even for the legislative power, was literally a struggle against corruption and simony in the Church."

But it cannot be denied that the weapons which

1 See esp. Bromton, pp. 1152, 1021 (ed. and vol. as above). 2 Eadmer's Hist. Nov., Book III. p. 67; Florent. Wigorn. p. 51.

Anselm used would soon become dangerous in the hands of meaner men.

His death was almost immediately succeeded by one of those struggles between the monks and bishops with which the pages of Gervasius are so painfully full, and the immediate issue of this struggle was to raise William of Corbeil to the throne of Canterbury, and thus indirectly to place Stephen on the throne of England. For whatever influences were at work in this latter election, however much the Flemings' whom Stephen brought over helped to enforce his claim, or the welcome of the people of London 2 to confirm it, the power of the Church, and especially of Henry of Winchester and his ally the Archbishop of Canterbury, seem undoubtedly to have turned the day. And throughout the miserable masque of anarchy' which fitly closes the line of Norman kings, this power rises higher and higher, and becomes more lawless as it grows.

'See Stephanides, Vita S. Thomæ, p. 13, Script. Hist. Angl., ed. Sparke.

2 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, vol. ii. p. 229.

3 Guill. Malmesb. Hist. Nov., Book I. vol. ii. p. 702, ed. Hardy; Gesta Stephani Regis, p. 4, ed. Sewell; Johannes Hagustaldensis, p. 258; Hist. Ang. Script., vol. i.