No detailed account can be given here of the prelates whom the Conqueror appointed to ecclesiastical office in England. In point of origin they were a very heterogeneous class of men. Some of them were monks from the great abbeys of Normandy; Gundulf of Rochester came from Caen, Remigius of Dorchester from Fécamp; others, such as Robert of Hereford, were of Lotharingian extraction. Under the Conqueror, as under his successors, service at the royal court was a ready road to ecclesiastical promotion; nor were the clerks of the king’s chapel the least worthy of the new prelates. Osmund of Salisbury, who attained to ultimate canonisation, had been chancellor from 1072 to 1077. But a question immediately presents itself as to the relations which existed between these foreign lords of the church and the Englishmen, clerk and lay, over whom they ruled. Learned and zealous they might be, and yet, at the same time, remain entirely out of touch with the native population of England. To presuppose this, however, would be a great injustice to the new prelates. The very diversity of their origin prevented them from sharing the racial pride of the lay nobility, and their position as servants of a universal church told in the same direction. They learned the English language, and some at least among them preached to the country folk in the vernacular. They preserved the cult of the native saints, though they criticised with good reason the grounds on which certain kings and prelates had received canonisation, and in most dioceses they retained without modification the forms of ritual which had been developed by the Anglo-Saxon church. Among all the forces which made for the assimilation of Englishman to Norman in the century following the Conquest the work of King William’s bishops and abbots must certainly hold a high place.
The friendly relations which had existed between William and the Curia during the pontificate of Alexander II. were not interrupted immediately by the accession of Hildebrand, in 1073, but there soon appeared ominous symptoms of coming strife. It was no longer a matter of vital importance for William to retain the favour of the papacy—he was now the undisputed master of England and Normandy alike. Hildebrand, a man of genius, in whose passionate character an inherent hatred of compromise clashes with a statesmanlike recognition of the demands of practical expediency, could not be expected to refrain from advancing the ecclesiastical claims to the furtherance of which his whole soul was devoted. The Conqueror had indeed gone far in the work of reform, but neither in England nor in Normandy did he show any intention of conforming to the Hildebrandine conception of the model relationship which should exist between church and state. Of his own will he appointed his bishops and abbots, and they in turn paid him homage for their temporal possessions; he controlled at pleasure the intercourse between his prelates and the Holy See. Herein lay abundant materials for a quarrel; the wonder is that it did not break out for six years after Hildebrand’s succession.