[7] “In England Anselm had stood only for right and liberty; he, the chief witness for religion and righteousness, saw all round him vice rampant, men spoiled of what was their own--justice, decency, honour trampled under foot. Law was unknown, except to ensnare and oppress. The King’s Court was the instrument of one man’s selfish and cruel will, and of the devices of a cunning and greedy minister. The natural remedies of wrong were destroyed and corrupted; the king’s peace, the king’s law, the king’s justice, to which men in those days looked for help, could only be thought of in mocking contrast to the reality. Against this energetic reign of misrule and injustice, a resistance as energetic was wanted; and to resist it was felt to be the call and bounden duty of a man in Anselm’s place. He resisted, as was the way in those days, man to man, person to person, in outright fashion and plain-spoken words. He resisted lawlessness, wickedness, oppression, corruption. When others acquiesced in the evil state, he refused; and further, he taught a lesson which England has since largely learned, though in a very different way. He taught his generation to appeal from force and arbitrary will to law. It was idle to talk of appealing to law in England; its time had not yet come.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_. [8] “No discipline restrained them (the king’s attendants); they plundered, they devastated, they destroyed. What they found in the houses which they invaded and could not consume, they took to market to sell for themselves or they burnt it. If it was liquor they would bathe the feet of their horses in it or pour it on the ground. It shames me to recall the cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families and the insults on their wives and daughters. And so, whenever the king’s coming was known beforehand, people fled from their houses and hid themselves and their goods, as far as they could, in the woods or wherever safety might be found.”--Eadmer. [9] “If the Church had continued to buttress the thrones of the king’s whom it annointed, or if the struggle had terminated in an undivided victory, all Europe would have sunk down under a Byzantine or Muscovite despotism.”--Acton, _History of Freedom in Christianity_. [10] “By the surrender of the significant ceremony of delivering the bishopric by the emblematic staff and ring, it was emphatically put on record that the spiritual powers of the bishop were not the king’s to give; the prescription of feudalism was broken.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_.