Within these limits the bishops had a great deal of new power; and, as they succeeded in a great measure to the implicit faith and obedience which the nation had given to their own English bishops, they were able to exert a very strong influence towards keeping the nation together. They were kept by the king upon his side, as opposed to the barons, and securing them he secured the nation. This is clear even in the history of Anselm, who, although opposed to and persecuted by the king, never forgot his duty to the people so far as to take part with the barons against him. Besides the bishops, however, there was in the monasteries a great reserve fund of national feeling; and, up to the reign of Henry II., what little we can trace of English feeling is to be traced in the writings of the monks; they kept alive an English sentiment as distinct from the new national idea that was to blend English and Norman, the king and the bishops more distinctly representing the latter. [Sidenote: In Stephen’s reign. ] [Sidenote: Secular school. ] These things being so, we are able to understand what it was that gave the prelates the great moral weight they possessed in Stephen’s reign, and to perceive how vast was the importance of maintaining the alliance between them and the crown. We learn too how the many streams of influence which they guided reacted upon the clerical body itself, and produced several distinct schools or classes of ecclesiastical character. In the first place, the kings had taken prelates to be their ministers, and had promoted their ministers to be prelates. Bishop Roger of Salisbury was not only a powerful ecclesiastic but the royal justiciar, the head of all the courts and the treasurer of all the money of the king. Under him was a set of clerks who would set the fashion for one school of the clergy, secular in mind and aim and manners; often married men, so far as their right to marry can be accounted valid, canons of cathedrals where they provided for their children and made estates for themselves; worthy men most of them, the predecessors of the clerical magistrates of this day, far greater in quarter sessions and county meetings than in convocation or missionary work. That was one very strong school--a school that required tender handling both politically and ecclesiastically, and in the view of which we can understand how important it was for Bishop Roger to secure the consent of the Pope and the archbishops to his holding secular office. For it is said that, worldly man as he was, he refused, as a matter of conscience as well as policy, to act as the king’s minister, without the distinct approval of the saintly Anselm and his successors, the archbishops as well as the popes. [Sidenote: Ecclesiastical school. ]