England
In 911 Rollo (Rolf) the Norseman and his followers ceased their raids on the Frankish coast and, with the blessing of the emperor, settled down
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in the region of the lower Seine.
Within a century the Normans, having assimilated Frankish institutions, including Frankish law and the Frankish language, began to show a genius for military exploits as well as for political alliances and the art of government. In 1047 the eighteenyear-old William, Duke of Normandy, a direct descendant of Rollo, started on a military and political career that made him one of the two or three most powerful rulers of Europe. The first years were occupied with repelling internal and external enemies, including the Count of Anjou and the King of France. During this time William was comforted by support from the English king, Edward the Confessor, who in 1051, being childless, apparently named him as his heir. On Edward's death in 1066, William, who by then had consolidated his power in Normandy and had added the counties of Brittany and Maine to his dominions, landed on the English coast with some seven thousand men, including about one thousand trained horsemen (many with their mounts), and defeated the rival claimant to the throne, Harold, son of Godwin.The Norman conquest of England was not unrelated to the contemporaneous Norman conquest of southern Italy. In the first place, the Normans had a strong sense of common nationality. Wherever they were, they never forgot that they were Normans. Duke William is said to have encouraged his troops at the Battle of Hastings by reminding them of the exploits of their compatriots in Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. More important, perhaps, was their sense of common mission. Both in England and in Italy the Normans came as crusaders, bearers of the true faith, self-styled "soldiers of Christ." William, like Robert Guiscard and the Great Count Roger, was a partisan of the Cluniac Reform and therefore an opponent of clerical marriages, purchase and sale of church offices, and baronial domination of the priesthood.
By the same token, they were partisans of the sacral kingship -- the chief priesthood of the emperor or king, his headship of the church within his domain. This did not, at first, bring them into confrontation with the papacy; on the contrary, it brought them into alliance with the papacy, which had supported the Cluniac Reform and was only beginning to turn it in a new direction, toward freedom of the clergy from "secular" control. The papacy in the 1060s and 1070s welcomed the reforming zeal of the Norman rulers-and exploited their political support in the impending struggle against the emperor. Just as Pope Nicholas II blessed in advance the conquests of Richard and Robert Guiscard in 1059, so Pope Alexander II in 1066 gave his blessing in advance to William's conquest of England, which he called a crusade to reform the corrupt English churches. 31A few years later Pope Gregory VII hoped to persuade the Norman rulers both of England and of southern Italy to accept the claims to supremacy that he made in the Dictatus Papae of 1075. This they politely
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refused to do, however, and he was not in a position to press them very hard. They remained in complete control of the clergy within their respective kingdoms. William the Conqueror_like Robert Guiscard and Roger made his own appointments to the episcopate, without consulting Rome in
advance He replaced all except two bishops of England with appointees of Norman birth or training.
(His Archbishop of Canterbury, the great Lanfranc, was Italian by birth, as was Lanfranc's famou s successor, Anselm, but both had for decades held important posts in Normandy before being brought to England by William I and his son William II, respectively.) Also, William the Conqueror did not hesitate to enact ecclesiastical laws binding upon the church in England and Normandy.
Thus the Caesaropapist inclinations of the Norman kings of England were not essentially different from those of the Norman kings of southern Italy.
William II ( William Rufus) of England -- Normandy went to his brother Robert on the Conqueror's death -- who reigned from 1087 to 1100, ruthlessly violated the rights of the church, and would have been excommunicated by the pope in 1098 had he not had Anselm's support. Yet even the tyrannical William II never sought to be appointed papal legate, while Count Roger not only sought such an appointment but obtained it for himself and his successors in perpetuity. 32 The Norman rulers of England and Normandy, though they thoroughly dominated the church in their domains during the first two generations after the Conquest, had to reckon with the fact that, in contrast to Sicily, the population of England and Normandy contained many supporters of the papal party, and that some concessions by the king to the "freedom of the church" were necessary in order for him to retain the support of prominent Norman leaders as well as of the Anglo-Saxons, who constituted not only the vast majority of the English lower classes but some elements of the upper classes as well.This division concerning the permissible limits of royal control over the church in England and Normandy was important for the future. It contributed to the virtual breakdown of civil authority during the reign of the Conqueror's grandson, Stephen ( 1135-1154), and it led finally to the fateful controversy between Stephen's successor, Henry II ( 1154-1189), and Archbishop Becket.
No doubt the sociocultural as well as the political differences between England and Normandy, on the one hand, and southern Italy on the other hand, including the historical background of Greek, Byzantine, and Islamic settlement in southern Italy, help to explain the differences in the situation of the church in the two countries and, in particular, the failure of the Sicilian church to rise against the tyrannical rule of Count Roger I (died 1105), King Roger II (died 1154), and their successors.
Nevertheless, the legal situation of the church in England and in NorÂ
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mandy, in the period immediately after 1066, bore a certain similarity to that of the church in the Norman Kingdom of Sicily.
William, like Roger, appointed the bishops in his domain and controlled them. In a decree of 1067 he declared that the King of England and Duke of Normandy had the p ower to determine whether a pope should be acknowledged by the church in England andNormandy, that no ecclesiastical council held in his kingdom could make canon law without his consent, and that the king had a veto power over ecclesiastical penalties imposed on his barons and officials. 33 William separated the ecclesiastical and secular courts; in 1072 he ordered that spiritual pleas should henceforth be tried by bishops and archdeacons in their own courts "in accordance with the canons and episcopal laws." 34 This, separation, which was also introduced in Sicily by Roger I, strengthened the church courts against local influences but not against the king, who retained his supreme authority within the church courts themselves. Both the Conqueror and his son William Rufus defied the efforts of Pope Gregory VII and his successors to assert papal supremacy over the English and Norman clergy. William Rufus showed his contempt by allowing the archbisho pric of Canterbury to remain vacant for four years after the death of Lanfranc so that the crown might collect its revenues.
When William Rufus's brother, Henry I, ascended the English throne in 1100, however, the position of the papacy was strong enough to secure from King Henry substantial compromises with respect to the appointment of clergy. In return, Henry had papal support for his reconquest of Normandy from his brother Robert. The Concordat of Bec (Normandy), made in 1107, anticipated the Concordat of Worms of 1122 in transferring from the king to the pope the authority to invest bishops and abbots with the insignia of their offices, the ring and the staff, uttering the words "Receive the church!" Like the emperor in 1122, King Henry I agreed to the free election of bishops and abbots by the church in Normandy and England but retained the right to be present at such elections and thus, in effect, to intervene when elections were disputed.
Moreover, as later in Germany, the bishops and abbots in England and Normandy were not to be consecrated by the church until the king had invested them, by scepter, with the "regalia," receiving from them in return homage and fealty. 35These royal concessions with regard to the naming of bishops and abbots did not-at the time -Âsubstantially affect the other powers that Henry I exercised over the church in England and in Normandy. It was only during the so-called anarchy of Stephen that the papal party in England and Normandy made important gains in prestige and power, and only in the subsequent reign of Henry II -Âand especially after the martyrdom of' Becket -- that the church in England and Normandy
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achieved a substantial measure of freedom from royal and ducal domination. It was not, of course, as substantial a measure as the papal party would have liked; but it was a greater independence than the church obtained in most other countries of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and, of course, far greater than in Sicily. 36 ___________
Paradoxically, the freedom of the church in England and Normandy nourished the growth of royal governmental and legal institutions. This was due in part to the theory of the dualism of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, according to which secular rulers were responsible for keeping the peace and doing justice in their respective realms. It was also due in part to royal competition with, and emulation of, the ecclesiastical state. It is therefore not accidental that England and Normandy, the European polity in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries where the church was most free of royal control and most subject to papal authority, was also a polity where the system of royal government and royal law was very highly developed -- almost as highly developed as in Sicily. It was, in fact, under Henry II that the foundations were laid for the modern English system of royal law (the English common law) as it existed and developed until at least the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.