[Sidenote: Roman influence comparatively small under the Saxons.]
We can hardly be wrong in gathering from all this, that Roman influence had only to a certain limited extent been introduced into the Church of England by St. Augustine's mission, and that, as time passed on, the foreign element had become absorbed in the national one. With the Norman conquest of A.D. 1066, the { 146} case was, however, altered. [Sidenote: Much increased under the Normans.] The claims of the Popes to temporal as well as to spiritual authority were by that time definite and authoritative; the Conquest itself had been undertaken by the permission of Alexander II., and the authority of the foreign conquerors, (as the Norman and early Plantagenet kings continued to be,) required foreign support. Hence the Bishops of Rome gained an amount of political influence in England which was thoroughly unconstitutional, and which could probably never have been attained by any foreign power, had the English sovereigns immediately after the Conquest felt themselves more firmly fixed upon the throne they had seized.
[Sidenote: Denationalizing of the Episcopate.]
The appointment of foreigners to the highest ecclesiastical offices in England, was one means by which the Norman sovereigns sought to secure themselves against disaffection amongst their new subjects; but the real result of this policy was to foster the claims of the Popes to religious and secular supremacy in this country; for these foreign ecclesiastics, though English Bishops, were not loyal subjects of the English crown, nor were their interests identical with those of their flocks. [Sidenote: Lanfranc.] Thus the Italian Lanfranc, when appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by William the Conqueror (A.D. 1070), did not hesitate to obey the summons of the Pope to Rome for the purpose of receiving the pall, and thus acknowledging that he held his Bishopric from the Papal see. [Sidenote: St. Anselm.] His successor, St. Anselm (A.D. 1093), also an Italian, and a man of great learning and holiness, was prepared to carry out a similar line of conduct; but the covetous and irreligious tyrant, William Rufus, was seeking at { 147} the same time to reduce Bishops to the state of mere nominees and vassals of the crown, and a long contest ensued[2]. The dispute was carried on into the next reign; and at length, in A.D. 1107, a compromise was agreed upon, by which it was arranged that Bishops should receive investiture from the Pope, and, at the same time, take an oath of allegiance to the king. [Sidenote: St. Thomas of Canterbury.] Anselm's unflinching advocacy of Papal claims cost him years of exile from his diocese, and much suffering; but, in the following century, similar conduct involved still more serious consequences to St. Thomas à Becket, the then Archbishop of Canterbury. The new question in dispute was the right of clerical offenders to be tried in the spiritual courts, instead of coming under the jurisdiction of the civil power; but, in reality, it was only another form of the constant endeavours of the English monarchs to free themselves from the foreign bondage which was, to some extent at least, self-imposed. Becket fell a martyr to his own sense of duty and the king's displeasure, A.D. 1170.