Still the institution continued. At the end of the Saxon period, a thriving trade in the export of English slaves was carried on at Bristol, till Bishop Wulstan put an end to it. The Twenty-ninth Canon of the Synod of Westminster, held under Anselm in 1102, enacted that there should be no buying and selling of men in England as heretofore, as if they were kine or oxen. But this did not put a stop to it. Slaves were bought and sold by Church dignitaries as late as the fourteenth century, as we shall see in a later chapter, and the status of serfdom continued to the sixteenth century.
[Illustration: Coronation of Harold by Archbishop Stigand. Bayeux tapestry.]
One immediate result of the Norman conquest was that Archbishop Stigand and several other bishops and abbots were ejected, and foreign ecclesiastics put in their place. It is not necessary to suppose that William acted solely on the desire to put men devoted to his interests into these positions of power and influence, for Edward the Confessor had already appointed some foreign bishops with the object of raising the tone of learning and religion in the English Church; and all William's nominees were men of character, learning and practical ability. The removal of some of the sees from unimportant villages to the principal town of the diocese was a wise measure. It is said that some of the Norman bishops desired to make the further improvement of replacing the monks, where they existed, in their cathedrals, by canons, but were thwarted by Lanfranc.[73]
The parochial clergy seem to have been left undisturbed in their benefices; only, as the benefices fell vacant in the usual course of things, the new Norman lords of the manor, who had in so many cases supplanted the old Saxon thanes, not unnaturally appointed relatives or countrymen of their own to at least the more valuable of the parochial benefices in their gift.