But their strife was not merely a strife of tongues; it was their pleasure to thwart one another in deed as well as in word. Whenever the monks got footing in the cathedrals (which in many instances they very soon did,) they proved a perpetual thorn in the side of the bishop, more especially if he happened to have been promoted from the secular clergy himself. Then they carried themselves towards him in a spirit of “untamed reluctance.” They would not have this man to reign over them. The bishops were vexed at thus having to encounter foes in their own households, and sometimes we find them expressing an angry but impotent wish, that England was clear of them; and sometimes we find them by a stretch of power expelling the whole fraternity at once, and filling up their places with canons who were ever wont to be faithful and obedient to their diocesan.[72] On one occasion, indeed, this policy is not only put in practice by a bishop of Winchester, but an attempt is made by him to induce all the prelates of England to adopt the same. William the Conqueror (for it was under him that the thing occurred) was nothing loth to listen to the overture of Walkelin (for that was the bishop’s name), and to second this violent measure,[73] probably meaning to lay claim to a lion’s share of the spoil;[74] for the Norman princes, like some more modern reformers, had the appetite of the dragon of Wantly--“houses and churches were to them geese and turkeys;” but archbishop Lanfranc, the first metropolitan under the Norman dynasty, a good man and a wise, stood in the gap, and saved his church from the tender mercies of a reform, which, being interpreted, would have been a robbery. He, again, had been himself a monk, and probably would on that account view the transgressions of the monks with more charity, and, perhaps, be personally less exposed to their malice. And, indeed, if there must needs be this division of seculars and regulars, it was a happy circumstance for the church, and we will add for the country (for with all its gross defects it was the fountain of life and light to the nation in those times), that the dignitaries were taken from both classes, though chiefly, no doubt, from the regulars; and that thus they mutually acted as checks upon those classes, in any momentary ebullitions of party spirit; not to say that those who were removed from the monastery to the mitre would find their past prejudices corrected by a new position and new interests, and by the discovery that men of their own order were not always the most dutiful of their sons. Thus in the working of the system, there were some of those selfcorrecting principles and balances brought into play which in part protected it from itself, and the like to which (though so often overlooked or undervalued) constitute the real worth of many a system which wears an unpromising aspect, and which, in spite of those querulous empirics who assure us that it ought to go intolerably wrong,