ENGLISH WRITERS. BOOK III. From the Conquest to Chaucer. CHAPTER I. LIGHT FROM THE SOUTH-CLOSE OF THE ELEVENTH CENTURY. IN tracing the roots of our literature we find that they stretch far across Europe: northward we follow them to Iceland, southward to Provence and to the lands lying beyond the Mediterranean yet farther south. From the The Norman Conquest brought England at once into relation with the life of southern Europe. In the years next after the Conquest there were only faint beginnings of Provençal song. The first of the troubadours from whom verse has come down to us were Ebles of Ventadour and his feudal lord, a Count of Poitou, who was William IX., Duke of Aquitaine and Count of Poitou, born in the year 1071, and but eighteen years old at the time of the death of the Italian Lanfranc. Although not an English writer, Lanfranc died in England in the year 1089, an old man of eighty-four, who for nineteen years had been Archbishop of Canterbury. B-VOL. III. Lanfranc. At Canterbury he rebuilt the cathedral, was high in favour of William the Conqueror, and during part of the reign of William Rufus was also chief director of affairs in Church and State. Lanfranc was born, in 1005, at Pavia, son of a keeper of the public archives. He studied at Bologna, where he practised as an advocate, removed to France, and was famous as a teacher at Avranches. On his way from Avranches to Rouen, in 1041, he fell among thieves, was robbed in a forest near the abbey of Bec, tied to a tree, and abandoned. During a day and night of solitary peril he devoted himself to God, and, when released by travellers next day, asked the name of the nearest monastery. He was directed to the abbey of Bec, then newly founded by the unlettered Abbot Herluin, one of a noble Danish family, who had been bred to arms, had left the world, and was in much need of a good scholar in his abbey. To Bec, therefore, Lanfranc retired as a monk; in three years he became prior there, Herluin still living as abbot, and opened a school which he made famous by his teaching. Duke William made Prior Lanfranc one of his Counsellors of State, and when he obtained for William the permission of the Pope to marry his own cousin, on condition that he built a monastery, the monastery, dedicated to St. Stephen, was built at Caen, and Lanfranc was made its abbot. When William became King of England, Lanfranc was still his agent at Rome; and when, in England, William deposed in favour of his followers those of the Saxon clergy upon whose goodwill he could not depend, Lanfranc obtained the mitre of Stigand Archbishop of Canterbury. There was some controversial writing by Lanfranc upon the Eucharist against Berengarius, who, as a follower of Erigena, applied reason to the support of dogmatic theology. Berengarius applied the scholastic philosophy to one main doctrine of the theologians of his day in a way that brought upon him fierce attack for heresy. He had been in 1031, at the age of thirty-three, the head of the Cathedral School in his native city of Tours. There he taught that the bread and wine in the sacrament are spiritually but not materially transformed into the body and blood of Christ for worthy partakers. Christ, he taught, does not descend to be divided into portions by the hands of priests, but the hearts of the true believers rise to heaven and partake spiritually of His imperishable body. Berengarius reasoned against the material change in terms used by the nominalists, and was surprised to find Lanfranc opposed to him; but for his own opinions he was more than once in danger of death, and once imprisoned as a heretic. Hildebrand sought to shelter him at the Synod of Rome in 1059. But when Hildebrand had become Pope Gregory VII. he was obliged to satisfy the fury of adverse opinion and force on his friend protection by compelling recantation. Berengarius withdrew from the strife to quiet prayer until his death in 1088. Lanfranc wrote also a tract of doctrine on the sacredness of the Confidence of the Confessional,” and on the position of a penitent who, for want of a proper confessor, might choose any clerk or layman or confess to God alone, though such confession would not be a sacrament. Sixty-three letters almost wholly upon business of the Church, and a speech delivered in the Council at Winton, A.D. 1072, are in the list of Lanfranc's lesser writings. There remains also some impress of his mind upon a curious body of rules for the government of Benedictine monks, written when as Primate he had converted his chapter of Canterbury into a Benedictine monastery; besides these pieces we have his chief work, a complete body of Commentaries on St. Paul's Epistles, apparently notes for or from his oral teaching. Anselm, a profounder scholar, was Lanfranc's favourite pupil, and his successor, first as Prior of Bec, afterwards, under William Rufus, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm, born in 1034, at Aosta, in Piedmont-his father a Lombard, his mother a Burgundian-Archbishop of Canterbury though he was, belongs no more than Lanfranc to English literary history. Anselm. Eadmer. But a true Kentish man was the Eadmer or Edmer who wrote Anselm's life. He was one of the Benedictines of Canterbury, and, as he says of himself, was from childhood in the habit of noting and remembering events, especially those which concerned the Church.* His genius in this respect made him an admirable chronicler. He wrote in six books of clear Latin a "Historia Novorum,” or History of his own Time from the Conquest to the year 1122, preceding his account of the Conquest with the prophecy ascribed to St. Dunstan, and ending his History with the death of Ralph of Escures, Anselm's successor in the archbishopric of Canterbury. When Alexander I., in 1120, desired to make Eadmer-nominated for him by Archbishop Ralph-Bishop of St. Andrew's, Eadmer refused, unless he might, as a bishop in Scotland, profess allegiance to the primacy of Canterbury. This claim for the aggrandisement of Canterbury was of course denied; and Eadmer died three or four years afterwards, in high esteem at Rome, without having been made a bishop. As Anselm's pupil, afterwards his friend, his spiritual director by the Pope's appointment, and his companion when, having offended William Rufus, he retired from England, Eadmer became also Anselm's biographer. He wrote the Life of Anselm in two books. He wrote Lives, too, of Wilfrid of York; of the pious Bregwin, German born, who died Archbishop of Canterbury in the year 765; of Oswald of York; and of Dunstan. There is also a letter of his to the * "Historia Novorum," lib. ii. Eadmer, "Historia Novorum," lib. v. ad fin. |