William's hand was felt almost as much by the Church as by the State. He began by clearing away, one after another, all the English bishops; Wulfstan of Worcester, a simple old man of very holy life, was ere long the sole survivor of the old hierarchy. Their places were filled by Normans and other foreigners, the primatial seat of Canterbury being placed in the hands of Lanfranc of Pavia, a learned Italian monk who had long been a royal chaplain, and had afterwards been made Abbot of Bec; he was always the best and most merciful of the king's counsellors. William and Lanfranc brought England into closer touch with the continental Church than had been known in earlier days. This was but natural when we remember that it was with the Pope's blessing and under his consecrated banner that the land had been conquered. The new Norman bishops continued Dunstan's old policy of favouring the monks at the expense of the secular clergy, and of establishing everywhere strict rules of clerical discipline. Their stern asceticism was not without its use, for the English clergy had of late grown somewhat lax in life, and unspiritual and worldly in their aims. It was with Lanfranc's aid that William took a step in the organization of the Church that was destined to be a sore trouble to his successors in later days. Hitherto offences against the law of the Church had been tried in the secular courts, and this was not felt to be a grievance by the clergy, because the bishops and abbots both sat in the Witan and attended the meetings of the local shire courts, where such offences--bigamy, for example, or perjury, or witchcraft, or heresy--were tried. But William and Lanfranc now gave the bishops separate Church courts of their own, and withdrew the inquiry into all ecclesiastical cases from the king's court. Though William did not grasp the fact, he was thus erecting an institution which might easily turn against the royal power, as the ecclesiastical judges in their new courts were not under the control of the crown, and had no reason to consult the king's interests. But in William's own time the Church-courts gave no trouble, for they had not yet learnt their power, and the bishops dreaded the king's arm too much to offend him. For William was no slave of the Church; when Pope Gregory VII. bade him do homage to the papacy for his English crown, because he had won England under the papal blessing, he sturdily refused. He announced also that he would outlaw any cleric who carried appeals or complaints to Rome without his permission, and he forbade the clergy to excommunicate any one of his knights for any ecclesiastical offence, unless the royal permission were first obtained. [Sidenote: =Rebellion of Earls of Norfolk and Hereford.--Execution of Waltheof.=]