ert, the Norman archbishop of Canterbury. An Englishman
Stigand received his see, but was excommunicated at Rome, and was
regarded even in England as schismatical. When William of Normandy
planned his invasion of England, Alexander II., by the advice of
Hildebrand, afterwards Gregory VII., moved doubtless by this schism and
by the desire to bring the English Church under the influence of the
Cluniac revival and into closer relation with Rome, gave the duke a
consecrated banner, and the Norman invasion had something of the
character of a holy war.

Norman times.

Before the Norman Conquest the church had relapsed into deadness:
English bishops were political partisans, the clergy were married, and
discipline and asceticism, then the recognized condition of holiness,
were extinct. The Conqueror's relations with Rome ensured a reform; for
the papacy was instinct with the Cluniac spirit. In 1070 papal legates
were received and held a council by which Stigand was deposed. Lanfranc,
abbot of Bec, was appointed archbishop of Canterbury and worked
harmoniously with the king in bringing the English Church up to the
level of the church in Normandy. Many native bishops and abbots were
deposed, and the Norman prelates who succeeded them were generally of
good character, strict disciplinarians, and men of grander ideas. A
council of 1075 decreed the removal of bishops' sees from villages to
towns, as on the continent; the see of Sherborne, for example, was
removed to Old Sarum, and that of Selsey to Chichester, and many
churches statelier than of old were built in the Norman style which the
Confessor had already adopted for his church at Westminster. In another
council priests and deacons were thenceforward forbidden to marry.
William and Lanfranc also worked on Hildebrandine lines in separating
ecclesiastical from civil administration. Ecclesiastical affairs were
regulated in church councils held at the same time as the king's
councils. Bishops and archdeacons were no longer to exercise their
spiritual jurisdiction in secular courts, as had been the custom, but in
ecclesiastical courts and according to canon law. The king, however,
ruled church as well as state; Gregory granted him control over
episcopal elections, he invested bishops with the crozier and they held
their temporalities of him, and he allowed no councils to meet and no
business to be done without his licence. Gregory claimed homage from
him; but while the king