at solemn day, to raise obedience and
order into religious duties, to uphold the custom and law of the realm
against personal tyranny, to guard amid the darkness and brutality of
the age those interests of religion, of morality, of intellectual life
which as yet lay peacefully together beneath the wing of the
Church,--this was the political office of the Primate in the new order
which the Conquest created, and it was this office which expressed
itself in the site of the house that fronted the King's house over
Thames.

From the days of Archbishop Anselm therefore to the days of Stephen
Langton, Lambeth only fronted Westminster as the Archbishop fronted the
King. Synod met over against Council; the clerical court of the one
ruler rivalled in splendour, in actual influence, the baronial court of
the other. For more than a century of our history the great powers which
together were to make up the England of the future lay marshalled over
against each other on either side the water.

With the union of the English people and the sudden arising of English
freedom which followed the Great Charter this peculiar attitude of the
Archbishops passed necessarily away. When the people itself spoke again,
its voice was heard not in the hall of Lambeth but in the Chapter-house
which gave a home to the House of Commons in its earlier sessions at
Westminster. From the day of Stephen Langton the nation has towered
higher and higher above its mere ecclesiastical organization, till the
one stands dwarfed beside the other as Lambeth now stands dwarfed before
the mass of the Houses of Parliament. Nor was the religious change less
than the political. In the Church as in the State the Archbishops
suddenly fell into the rear. From the days of the first English
Parliament to the days of the Reformation they not only cease to be
representatives of the moral and religious forces of the nation but
stand actually opposed to them. Nowhere is this better brought out than
in their house beside the Thames. The political history of Lambeth lies
spread over the whole of its site, from the gateway of Morton to the
garden where we shall see Cranmer musing on the fate of Anne Boleyn. Its
ecclesiastical interest on the other hand is concentrated in a single
spot. We must ask our readers therefore to follow us beneath the
groining of the Gate-House into the quiet little court that lies on the
river-side of the hall. Passing over its trim grass-plot to a doorwa