Monasticism, Learning and the Investiture Controversy
Monasticism, Learning and a Brewing Crisis
The Norman reform of the English Church did not stop with bishops and cathedrals. Norman lords also founded new monasteries, drove a programme of monastic learning, and reorganised the Latin schools that trained the next generation of clergy. By the end of William I’s reign, monasticism was a Norman as much as an English institution. But the closer the Norman Church grew to the papacy, the more the issue of investiture — who had the right to appoint bishops and abbots — threatened to break the partnership of king and Church. By the 1090s, England was drawn into the European-wide controversy that began with Pope Gregory VII.
A New Wave of Norman Abbeys
After 1066, Norman lords founded or refounded a remarkable number of monasteries. The most famous is Battle Abbey in Sussex, founded by William as penance for the bloodshed of Hastings; the abbey’s high altar was placed on the spot where Harold was said to have fallen. Other major Norman abbeys included Selby (1069), Tewkesbury (rebuilt from the 1070s), Shrewsbury (1083) and Bermondsey. By 1100 there were perhaps 250 monasteries in England, up from around 60 in 1066. The new houses were typically Benedictine, often staffed in the early years by monks brought from Norman houses such as Caen, Bec or Jumièges.
The number of monasteries in England rose from around 60 in 1066 to roughly 250 by 1100. Battle Abbey in Sussex was founded by William I as penance for the deaths at Hastings, with its high altar marking the place Harold was said to have fallen.
Monastic Life
Most Norman abbeys followed the Rule of St Benedict, the framework that governed monastic life across western Europe. Monks lived a tightly regulated day — the eight services of the Divine Office from Matins through to Compline, periods of manual work, periods of reading and study, and the sleeping and eating that fitted between them. Hospitality, charity to the poor, and prayers for the souls of dead patrons were all standard duties. Wealthy patrons (kings, tenants-in-chief and bishops) gave land in exchange for these prayers, which is how monasteries became economically powerful.
Cluniac Influence
Some Norman foundations followed the more demanding Cluniac reform: a network of monasteries linked to the great abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, founded in 910. Cluniac houses placed unusual emphasis on the elaborate liturgy of prayer (singing the Divine Office at length), held themselves independent of local lords, and looked to the Pope rather than to bishops or kings as their ultimate authority. The English Cluniac priory at Lewes was founded in 1078 by William de Warenne and his wife Gundrada. The arrival of Cluniac houses tied the Norman English Church into a wider European reform movement that pushed back against royal control of religious life.
Founding an abbey was a Norman lord’s way of doing several jobs at once. Religiously, monks would pray for his soul and the souls of his family in perpetuity. Politically, an abbey on his lands was a stable centre that strengthened his hold on the area. Economically, the abbey would clear forest, drain wetland and improve the value of donated estates. Culturally, it was a sign of status — a Norman lord with an abbey to his name was visibly part of the European Christian elite. The result was the wave of new foundations from Battle (begun about 1070) through Selby (1069), Shrewsbury (1083) and beyond.
Schools, Latin and the Vernacular
Norman monasteries and cathedrals were the schools of England. Cathedral schools at Canterbury, Lincoln and Durham trained boys in Latin grammar, rhetoric, music and basic arithmetic; the more advanced schools also taught the seven liberal arts. Lanfranc himself had taught at Bec, where he ran a school of European reputation. The Latin language was the lingua franca of educated Europe, used in royal writs, Church liturgy and Domesday Book itself.
Below the elite, however, the language story was layered. Norman lords and clerks spoke Anglo-Norman at home and in court; English peasants spoke Old English in the village; Latin ran the Church and chancery. The result was a trilingual ruling culture in which English persisted as the everyday speech of the majority, gradually picking up French vocabulary that would reshape it into Middle English by the 12th and 13th centuries. The vernacular Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was still being written in some monasteries (notably Peterborough) into the 12th century.
Norman England was a trilingual society. Norman lords and clerks spoke Anglo-Norman; English peasants spoke Old English; Latin ran the Church, the schools and royal documents like Domesday. By 1100 the three languages were starting to fuse, beginning the long change toward Middle English.
William I and the Papacy
William’s reform partnership with Lanfranc had to be balanced against the demands of Pope Gregory VII, the most assertive reform pope of the 11th century. Gregory pushed to end lay investiture — the appointment of bishops by kings and emperors — and to subordinate temporal rulers to papal authority. In 1080 Gregory pressed William to do homage to him for England, as some other rulers had done. William refused. He paid the customary annual tribute (Peter’s Pence), but he kept the right to appoint English bishops and to control papal access to England. Lanfranc supported William’s line, framing it as protection of the English Church against meddling from outside.
William II and Anselm: the English Investiture Controversy
After Lanfranc died in 1089, William II (Rufus) deliberately left the see of Canterbury vacant for four years, pocketing its revenues. Pressed by serious illness and his bishops, he finally appointed Anselm — Lanfranc’s pupil at Bec, by then the abbey’s abbot — in 1093. Anselm proved less compliant than Lanfranc. He insisted on recognising Pope Urban II in defiance of William’s preferred candidate; he refused to pay William large sums in gratitude for his appointment; he asserted that the Church owed obedience to the Pope on disputed matters of investiture. The clash with Rufus broke into the open after 1095. Anselm went into exile rather than accept what he saw as royal interference, and the dispute continued under Henry I until a compromise was reached in 1107.
William Rufus needed money. Crushing the 1088 rebellion, defending Normandy against his brother Robert Curthose, and paying mercenaries all required cash. The Church was wealthy: tenants-in-chief like the bishop of Durham held vast estates, and vacant sees produced revenue every month they remained empty. Rufus exploited the situation by leaving Canterbury vacant for four years (1089–93), holding the revenues for himself, and trying to install bishops on his own terms. Anselm’s clash with him was therefore part of a wider royal pattern of squeezing Church wealth that horrified contemporaries and fed twelfth-century stories of Rufus as an impious king. Some monastic chroniclers even wrote of his death in the New Forest in 1100 as God’s judgement.
Where Lanfranc had partnered loyally with William I against the papacy, Anselm clashed with William II from 1093 over Church appointments and obedience to Rome. Anselm’s exile drew England into the Investiture Controversy that ran across European politics from Pope Gregory VII’s reforms onwards.