Edward was not yet a canonized saint; the appeal is simply from the living and foreign king to the dead and native king.  This legend, growing up when Western Europe was torn in pieces by the struggle about investitures, proves better than the most authentic documents how the right which Popes denied to Emperors was taken for granted in the case of an English king.  But, while the spoils of England, temporal and spiritual, were thus scattered abroad among men of the conquering race, two men at least among them refused all share in plunder which they deemed unrighteous.  One gallant Norman knight, Gulbert of Hugleville, followed William through all his campaigns, but when English estates were offered as his reward, he refused to share in unrighteous gains, and went back to the lands of his fathers which he could hold with a good conscience.  And one monk, Wimund of Saint-Leutfried, not only refused bishoprics and abbeys, but rebuked the Conqueror for wrong and robbery.  And William bore no grudge against his censor, but, when the archbishopric of Rouen became vacant, he offered it to the man who had rebuked him.  Among the worthies of England Gulbert and Wimund can hardly claim a place, but a place should surely be theirs among the men whom England honours.

The primacy of Lanfranc is one of the most memorable in our history.  In the words of the parable put forth by Anselm in the next reign, the plough of the English Church was for seventeen years drawn by two oxen of equal strength.  By ancient English custom the Archbishop of Canterbury was the King’s special counsellor, the special representative of his Church and people.  Lanfranc cannot be charged with any direct oppression; yet in the hands of a stranger who had his spiritual conquest to make, the tribunitian office of former archbishops was lost in that of chief minister of the sovereign.  In the first action of their joint rule, the interest of king and primate was the same.  Lanfranc sought for a more distinct acknowledgement of the superiority of Canterbury over the rival metropolis of York.  And this fell in with William’s schemes for the consolidation of the kingdom.  The political motive is avowed.  Northumberland, which had been so hard to subdue and which still lay open to Danish invaders or deliverers, was still dangerous.  An independent Archbishop of York might consecrate a King of the Northumbrians, native or Danish, who might grow into a King of the English.  The Northern metropolitan had unwillingly to admit the superiority, and something more, of the Southern.  The caution of William and his ecclesiastical adviser reckoned it among possible chances that even Thomas of Bayeux might crown an invading Cnut or Harold in opposition to his native sovereign and benefactor.