Great Britain -- History -- Norman period, 1066-1154 -- Sources; Normans -- England
the bishops and clergy lifted up their voices and began to sing “_Te
deum laudamus_,” and carried rather than led the bishop elect to
the nearest church, he resisting the while as well as he could, and
saying: “It is all void, it is all void.” After they had performed the
customary ritual in the church, Anselm was brought back to the king
and said to him, “I tell you, my lord king, that you will not die of
your illness, and I wish you to know this that you will be able to set
right what has now been done with me, for I have not consented and do
not consent to its ratification....” The king however ordered him to
be invested without delay and diminution with all things belonging
to the archbishopric within and without, and further that the city
of Canterbury, which Lanfranc in his time held of the king as a fee,
and the abbey of St. Albans, which not only Lanfranc but also his
predecessors are known to have held, should pass as an alodiary[25]
possession for ever to Christ Church, Canterbury, for the redemption
of his soul.... The king recovered, as Anselm had foretold, and soon
undid all the good that he had decreed in his illness, and ordered it
to be annulled. The prisoners who had not yet been released he ordered
to be kept more straitly than usual, those who had been released to
be retaken if possible, old debts now pardoned to be exacted in full,
pleas and offences to be recalled to their original standing, and to
be tried and decided by the judgment of men who were concerned rather
to subvert justice than to maintain and defend it, and interested
rather in oppressing the wretched and in spoiling men of their wealth
than in correcting any crime. Wherefore there grew throughout the
realm so vast a woe and so woeful a waste that he who remembers it, I
judge, remembers to have never seen the like in England. Indeed every
evil that the king had done before his illness seemed a good thing in
comparison with the evils he did after his return to health. And if
any man will know the source from which they flowed, they can judge
by his answer to the bishop of Rochester, when the latter in friendly
conversation warned him after his recovery that he should in all things
behave more circumspectly towards God: “Be sure, bishop,” he said, “by
the Holy Cross of Lucca, that God shall never have me good because of
the evil He has brought upon me.”
THE QUARREL OF WILLIAM RUFUS AND ANSELM (1093-94).
=Source.=--Eadmer, _Historia Novorum in Anglia_, ed. Rule, p. 47.
(Rolls Series.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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