Lanfranc and the Reform of the English Church
Why a Church Reform?
A common student misconception is that the Anglo-Saxon Church was a corrupt mess that Lanfranc of Bec swept clean. The reality is more layered. The pre-conquest English Church had its own learning, its own monastic centres at Worcester and Canterbury, and its own reform impulses. What Lanfranc’s programme actually delivered was Norman political control over personnel, alongside doctrinal tightening that fitted with the wider European reform movement under Pope Gregory VII. Lanfranc was the king’s man as much as he was the Pope’s.
The Anglo-Saxon Church Before 1066
The English Church in 1066 had two archbishops — Canterbury and York — and around fifteen bishops, supervising parishes through rural deans and archdeacons. Major monasteries (Canterbury Christ Church, Winchester Old Minster, Worcester, Glastonbury, Ely) were centres of Latin learning, manuscript production and royal services. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was being written in monasteries during this period. Reform-minded English bishops such as Wulfstan of Worcester campaigned against the slave trade and pluralism well before Norman arrivals.
There were genuine criticisms. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, was a target. He held both Canterbury and Winchester at once (a practice called pluralism) and had received his pallium from the schismatic pope Benedict X, whom most of Europe did not recognise. Pope Alexander II considered Stigand uncanonical, which made his removal a useful piece of pre-conquest justification for William’s invasion.
In 1070 Stigand, the Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury, was deposed by a papal legate at the council of Winchester for pluralism and uncanonical appointment. William and Pope Alexander II replaced him with Lanfranc of Bec, an Italian-born monk and reformer.
Lanfranc’s Appointment, 1070
Lanfranc was born in Pavia (northern Italy) around 1010, trained in law and rhetoric, and entered the Benedictine abbey of Bec in Normandy as a monk. He became prior of Bec and built a school of European reputation; among his pupils was Anselm, his eventual successor at Canterbury. He was also a trusted adviser to Duke William of Normandy. In 1070, with William’s English position secured by the Harrying of the North, papal legates arrived at the Easter council at Winchester, deposed Stigand and several other Anglo-Saxon bishops, and consecrated Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Replacing Anglo-Saxon Bishops with Normans
Lanfranc’s most consequential change was personnel. By 1080, almost every English diocese had a Norman or Norman-trained bishop. The exceptions stand out: Wulfstan of Worcester was kept on because he had a reputation for personal sanctity and because Worcester was politically valuable. The replacement of the rest meant that the institutional voice of the English Church — bishops in royal council, in shire courts, at coronations — was now Norman. This was political control as much as doctrinal reform.
The 1075 Council of London and Diocesan Reorganisation
In 1075 Lanfranc held a major reform council at London. It re-established regular synods and codified Church discipline. Most strikingly, it ordered the relocation of several rural sees into towns — the seat of the bishop of Sherborne moved to Salisbury (Old Sarum), Selsey to Chichester, Lichfield to Chester (briefly), Dorchester to Lincoln. The political logic was Norman: bishops belonged in the towns where Norman castles, courts and markets were concentrated, not in remote Anglo-Saxon religious sites. The London council also forbade clergy from buying or selling church offices (simony) and tightened rules on clerical celibacy.
Lanfranc revived regular Church councils — synods that gathered bishops, abbots and senior clergy to discuss doctrine, discipline and reform. He developed the office of archdeacon (a senior cleric overseeing groups of parishes) and separated Church courts from secular ones, so that priests, monks and nuns answered to ecclesiastical justice for offences against canon law. This separation deepened the Church’s institutional autonomy and was an important step toward the late-medieval pattern of distinct Church and royal courts.
The Cathedral Building Programme
Lanfranc’s most visible legacy was stone. After 1070 nearly every English cathedral was rebuilt at Norman scale: Canterbury (Lanfranc’s own cathedral, begun 1070), Lincoln (begun 1072), St Albans (begun 1077), Old Sarum (begun 1075), Worcester (begun under Wulfstan, 1084), Durham (begun 1093). These buildings were enormous — longer, taller and heavier than anything in Anglo-Saxon England — and used the round-arched Romanesque style imported from Normandy. Like castles, they were instruments of conquest as much as of faith: a Norman bishop in a Norman stone cathedral made the new dispensation visible from miles away.
Between 1070 and 1100 nearly every English cathedral was rebuilt in the Romanesque style imported from Normandy — Canterbury, Lincoln, Old Sarum, St Albans, Worcester and Durham among them. The cathedrals were both centres of reform and visible symbols of Norman authority.
The Canterbury vs York Primacy Dispute
Lanfranc fought hard for the supremacy of Canterbury over York. At a 1072 council at Windsor he secured a written profession from Thomas of Bayeux, the new Archbishop of York, acknowledging Canterbury’s primacy. The dispute mattered politically: Canterbury was the natural ecclesiastical capital of southern England, but York had its own sphere of influence in the North. By securing Canterbury’s primacy, Lanfranc gave the Norman king a single archiepiscopal partner instead of two competing voices — a step toward more unified ecclesiastical politics.
Lanfranc was a reformer but he was also William’s loyal partner. He served as effectively regent in 1075 when William was in Normandy, putting down the Earls’ Revolt with quick mobilisation of royal and ecclesiastical forces. He supported William’s refusal to do homage to Pope Gregory VII for England in 1080 — an early sign of the limits of papal reach into Norman politics. The reform of the English Church was therefore inseparable from the establishment of Norman royal authority; Lanfranc was both reform’s agent and the king’s loyal servant.