The bishops assembled round the sick king’s bed would not hear the refusal. Here was religion well nigh destroyed in England, and evil rampant, and the Church of God stricken almost to death, and at such a time was Anselm to prefer his own ease and quiet to the call to deliver Canterbury from its bondage? By main force they placed a pastoral staff within his hands, and while the crowd shouted “Long live the bishop!” he was “carried rather than led to a neighbouring church.” The king at once ordered that Anselm should be invested with all the temporal rights of the see, as Lanfranc had held them, and in September, 1093, Anselm was enthroned at Canterbury, and in December he was consecrated. Anselm warned the bishops and nobles when they forced the archbishopric upon him that they were making a mistake. “You have yoked to the plough a poor weak sheep with a wild bull,” he said. “This plough is the Church of God, and in England it has been drawn by two strong oxen, the king and the Archbishop of Canterbury, one to do justice and to hold power in the things of this world, the other to teach and govern in the things eternal. Now Lanfranc is dead, and with his untamed companion you have joined an old and feeble sheep.” That the king and the archbishop were unevenly yoked was manifest on William’s recovery, but it was no poor sheep with whom Rufus had to deal, but a man as brave and steadfast as he was gentle and wise. Trouble began at once when William rose from his sick-bed. Anselm was now enthroned and no attempt was made to revoke the appointment. But the king’s promises of public amendment were broken without hesitation. The pardoned prisoners were seized, the cancelled debts redemanded and the proceedings against offenders revived. “Then was there so great misery and suffering through the whole realm that no one can remember to have seen its like in England. All the evil which the king had wrought before he was sick seemed good by the side of the wrong which he did when he was returned to health.” The king wanting money for his expedition against his brother, Robert of Normandy, tried to persuade Anselm to allow the Church lands, bestowed since Lanfranc’s death on vassals of the crown on tenure of military service, to remain with their holders. He was answered by steady refusal. Had Anselm yielded, he would have been a party to the alienation of lands, that, as part of the property of the see, he was bound to administer for the common good; he would have been a party not only to the spoiling of the Church, but to the robbery of the poor and needy, whose claims, in those days, to temporal assistance from Church estates were not disputed. Any subsequent restitution of such lands was impossible, he foresaw, if it was shown that the archbishop had confirmed what the king had done.