succeeded in establishing the celibacy of the priesthood and the stricter discipline of Rome. In all this movement for reform the dukes took a leading part, inviting the reformers to their courts, aiding in the foundation and restoration of cloisters, and lending their strong support to the efforts for moral improvement in the secular clergy. They also asserted their supremacy over the Norman church, presiding in its councils, revising the judgments of its courts, appointing and investing its bishops and abbots. Moreover, while ready to coöperate with the moral ideas of the Papacy, they resisted all attempts at papal interference in Norman affairs. When Alexander II sought to restore an abbot whom William the Conqueror had deposed, the duke replied that he would gladly receive papal legates in matters of faith and doctrine, but would hang to the tallest oak of the nearest forest any monk who dared to resist his authority in his own land. William’s resistance was equally firm in the case of Gregory VII, who failed completely in his efforts at direct action in William’s dominions. Nowhere on the Continent, concludes Böhmer,[52] was there at this time a country where the prince and his bishops were so energetic in the suppression of simony and violations of clerical vows; nowhere was the church so completely subject to the secular government. The most prominent figure in the Norman church of the eleventh century, Odo, for nearly fifty years bishop of Bayeux, was far from fulfilling the stricter ideal of a prelate’s life. Half-brother of the Conqueror through their mother Arlette, he received the bishopric as a family gift at the tender age of fourteen and became thereby one of the greatest princes of Normandy. His hundred and twenty knights’ fees furnished him a body of powerful vassals; his demesne gave him manors and forests for the support of his household, fuel for his fires and reeds and rushes for his hall, rents and tithes at Caen and the monopoly of the mill at Bayeux, tolls and fines and market rights which produced a considerable income in ready money. For the invasion of England he is said to have offered a hundred ships, and he took an active part in the battle of Hastings, swinging a huge mace in place of spear and sword, since the shedding of blood was forbidden to an ecclesiastic. In the distribution which followed, Odo received large estates in the southeast, as well as the earldom of Kent and the custody of Dover Castle, and he seems to have ruled his lands with a heavy hand both as earl and as regent in William’s absence. It even became his ambition to succeed the mighty Hildebrand as Pope, and he had already spent considerable sums at Rome when William, accusing him of tyranny and oppression, put him in prison, answering his assertion of ecclesiastical privilege with the statement that he imprisoned, not the bishop of Bayeux, but the earl of Kent. There he languished for