of view, a sovereign gains nothing by making himself a terror to any except evil-doers, that the surest basis for his authority is the preservation of order, justice and peace, and that so far at least the interests of king and people must be one. It is difficult to get rid of a feeling that Henry enforced justice and order from motives of expediency rather than of abstract righteousness. But, as a matter of fact, he did enforce them all round, on earl and churl, clerk and layman, Norman and Englishman, without distinction. And this steady, equal government was rendered possible only by the determined struggle which he waged with the Norman barons and their French allies. His home policy and his foreign policy were inseparably connected; and the lifelong battle which he fought with his continental foes was really the battle of England’s freedom. [43] Will. Malm. _Gesta Reg._, l. v. c. 398 (Hardy, p. 625). [44] Will. Malm. _Hist. Nov._, l. i. c. 9 (Hardy, p. 702). From the year 1103 onward the battle was fought wholly on the other side of the Channel. In England Henry, as his English subjects joyfully told him, became a free king on the day when he drove out Robert of Bellême.[45] One great hindrance indeed still remained, hanging upon him like a dead weight throughout his early struggles in Normandy; the controversy concerning ecclesiastical investitures, with which the rest of Europe had been aflame for a quarter of a century before it touched England at all. The decree of the Lateran Council of 1075 forbidding lay sovereigns to grant the investiture of any spiritual office with ring and staff was completely ignored in practice by William the Conqueror and Lanfranc. Their position on this and all other matters of Church policy was summed up in their reply to Pope Gregory’s demand of fealty: William would do what the English kings who went before him had done, neither more nor less.[46] But the king and the primate were not without perceiving that, as a necessary consequence of their own acts, the English Church had entered upon a new and more complicated relation both to the state and to the Apostolic see, and that the day must shortly come when she would be dragged from her quiet anchorage into the whirlpool of European controversies and strifes. Their forebodings found expression in the three famous rules of ecclesiastical policy which William laid down for the guidance of his successors rather than himself:--that no Pope should be acknowledged in England and no letter from him received there by any one without the king’s consent;--that no Church council should put forth decrees without his permission and approval;--and that no baron or servant of the crown should be laid under ecclesiastical censure save at the king’s own command.[47] These rules, famous in the two succeeding reigns under the name of “paternal customs,” were never put to the test of practice as long as William and Lanfranc lived.