Possibly also in some others, but in no case was the feast celebrated outside the walls of the monasteries.[536] It must have encountered opposition, for important personages, both ecclesiastical and secular, looked upon it with disfavour, and it was still very far from gaining the support of the secular clergy, of bishops and synods. Indeed one synod of the period forbade the feast altogether. Its adoption followed only in the fourteenth century. When we bear in mind the ecclesiastical and civil circumstances of the times, we are astonished to find how such a novelty—for so the feast is called in the writings already quoted—could have made its way to England first of all. For, in the eleventh century, that country was torn by internal strife, and invaded by foreign foes; while the national clergy, according to the statement of a contemporary English historian, were sunk in simony and worldliness.[537] That is scarcely the atmosphere suitable for the inception of a feast so intimately connected with the inner religious life of the community. For this some impulse from without was required. Such an impulse came indirectly from the East through intercourse with Normandy, whence so many learned and zealous monks and clergy came to England after the conquest. The political, or rather dynastic, connection of the country with Normandy dates not only from the battle of Hastings in 1066, but goes back to the times of King Edward the Confessor, whose wife Emma was a Norman princess. The official introduction of the feast of our Lady’s Conception in England only commenced in the thirteenth century, and only spread slowly. The provincial Synod of Oxford in 1222, Canon VIII., refused to recognise it as a feast of obligation, although it established its private observance. The diocesan Synod of Worcester does not mention it in its list of festivals. On the other hand it was celebrated at St Albans in 1228,[538] and the diocesan Synod of Exeter in 1287 formally adopted it by a decree which naturally affected that diocese alone.