One Vast Heap of Booty
Embarrassed by the behaviour of his Norman bishops and abbots, King William I asked monk Guitmond to come over and set an example.
1071
King William I 1066-1087
Rooftop cross on St Michael’s at the Northgate, Oxford.
© Ethan Doyle White, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
A rooftop cross seen from the tower of St Michael’s at the Northgate, Oxford. The tower is all that remains of the original Anglo-Saxon church, and had been standing for some thirty years when Guitmond was respectfully but firmly declining William I’s invitation to make his career in England. Guitmond’s point was that when an enterprise is rotten to its very foundations, it is useless to try to shore it up by cementing into it a few people of nobler stone. The Norman conquest of England was in his view utterly godless from the start, and anyone brought in to make it better would simply be allowing himself to become part of a great wrong.
Introduction
After seizing the English crown in 1066, William the Conqueror appointed French clergyman as bishops and abbots across England. Many were contemptuous and greedy, few spoke English and some used gendarmes to enforce their French ways. William begged Guitmond of the Abbey of St Leufroi in Normandy to set a better example, but Guitmond said the problem went deeper than that.
“I AM averse [said monk Guitmond] to undertaking any ecclesiastical function for many reasons, which I am not willing, nor would it become me, fully to detail. In the first place, when I consider well the infirmities, both bodily and mental, which I continually suffer, I painfully feel my inability to undergo the scrutiny of the divine Judge, for even now I lament that in my daily struggles to keep the path of life I am in continual danger of erring from the truth. But if I cannot safely rule myself, how shall I be able to direct the course of others in the way to salvation?*
“Besides, after carefully considering all circumstances, I do not see by what means I can fitly undertake the government of a community whose foreign manners and barbarous language* are strange to me; a wretched people, whose fathers and near relations and friends have either fallen by your sword, or have been disinherited by you, driven into exile, imprisoned, or subjected to an unjust and intolerable slavery. Search the scriptures and see if there be any law by which a pastor chosen by enemies can be intruded by violence on the Lord’s flock.
* See also Samuel Smiles on An Unpopular Popular Reform.
* Old English was a descendant of Germanic languages, and therefore ‘barbarous’ in the sense that it came from a barbarian, i.e. not Roman, people. Norman French was a descendant of Latin, and thus a so-called Romance language.
