out the waters of the river that
ran before him into a little well. His curiosity arrested, he asked
"what the boy proposed to do?" The boy replied, "To empty yon deep into
this well." "That canst thou never do," said the scholar. "Nor canst
thou," answered the boy, "exhaust the deep on which thou dost meditate
into the well of thy reason." Therewith the speaker vanished, and
Lanfranc, resigning the hope to achieve the mighty mystery, threw himself
at once into the arms of faith, and took his refuge in the monastery of
Bec.

The tale may be a legend, but not an idle one. Perhaps he related it
himself as a parable, and by the fiction explained the process of thought
that decided his career. In the prime of his manhood, about 1042, when
he was thirty-seven years old, and in the zenith of his scholarly fame,
he professed. The Convent of Bee had been lately founded, under Herluin,
the first abbot; there Lanfranc opened a school, which became one of the
most famous throughout the west of Europe. Indeed, under the Lombard's
influence, the then obscure Convent of Bee, to which the solitude of the
site and the poverty of the endowment allured his choice, grew the
Academe of the age. "It was," says Oderic, in his charming chronicle,
"it was under such a master that the Normans received their first notions
of literature; from that school emerged the multitude of eloquent
philosophers who adorned alike divinity and science. From France,
Gascony, Bretagne, Flanders, scholars thronged to receive his lessons."
[281]

At first, as superficially stated in the tale, Lanfranc had taken part
against the marriage of William with Matilda of Flanders--a marriage
clearly contrary to the formal canons of the Roman Church, and was
banished by the fiery Duke; though William's displeasure gave way at "the
decent joke" (jocus decens), recorded in the text. At Rome, however, his
influence, arguments, and eloquence were all enlisted on the side of
William: and it was to the scholar of Pavia that the great Norman owed
the ultimate sanction of his marriage, and the repeal of the interdict
that excommunicated his realm. [282]

At Rome he assisted in the council held 1059 (the year wherein the ban of
the Church was finally and formally taken from Normandy), at which the
famous Berenger, Archdeacon of Angers (against whom he had waged a
polemical controversy that did more than all else to secure his repute at
the Pontifical Court), abjured