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St. Anselm: Reluctant Archbishop?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Sally M. Vaughn
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Extract

In 1079, a few months after his consecration as abbot of Bec, St. Anselm set off for England to look after the abbey's lands there. In the course of his journey he stopped to visit Lanfranc, his predecessor as prior of Bec and now archbishop of Canterbury. Milo Crispin reports that when Anselm was returning to bed one night after Matins he found a gold ring in his possession. Crossing himself to determine whether it was some kind of vision sent by the devil to tempt him, he found that the ring was no illusion. After showing it to all the officials of Christ Church, Canterbury, and failing to find the owner, he sold it, giving the proceeds to the Christ Church monks. Lanfranc, hearing the story, interpreted it as a sign that Anselm would one day succeed him as archbishop just as Anselm had earlier succeeded him as prior of Bec.

Some years later, when the archbishopric was offered to Anselm, he pubicly opposed the appointment, repeatedly denying that he desired the office, and writing numerous letters refuting allegations that he was guilty of cupidity. Modern scholars, taking Anselm's protestations at face value, have cast him as a reluctant archbishop who would have preferred the quiet life at Bec to the storm at Canterbury. But is their conclusion necessarily true? Reluctance to assume important prelacies was an old medieval tradition, and one that Anselm evidently followed. An Anglo-Norman bishopric was a high and lucrative political position, often given as a reward for service to the king or duke. It was eagerly sought by careerists who desired to enrich themselves with the substantial lands and incomes that accompanied the episcopal office. The archbishopric of Canberbury was not only the highest prelacy in England, but one of the kingdom's three richest fiefs, lay or ecclesiastical. For Anselm to express a desire for such an office would be to compromise his saintly reputation and to cast himself in the mold of an ambitious courtier rather than as a servant of the Church. But certain of An-selm's actions suggest that in fact he aspired to the archbishopric, expecting to fulfil Lanfranc's prophecy and, as Milo Crispin implies, to follow in his footsteps.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , Fall 1974 , pp. 240 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1974

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Professor C. Warren Hollister for his criticism and suggestions; to Professor L. Purcell Weaver for help in the Latin translations; and to the members of Professor Hollister's seminar for their comments during the research for this paper. A shorter version of this essay was read at the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, San Luis Obispo, California, March, 1974.

References

1 Eadmer, , Vita Anselmi, ed. Southern, R. W. (London, 1962), pp. 44, 48, 54Google Scholar. Porée, A. A., Histoire de l'Abbaye du Bec (Evreux, 1901), I: 145, 153, 157, 159Google Scholar. Chibnall, Marjorie, “Anselm and the English Dependencies of Bec,” Spicilegium Beccensis (Paris, 1959), I: 521Google Scholar. Anselm was consecrated Feb. 22, 1079, after the death of Herluin, first abbot of Bec.

2 Crispin, Milo, “Vita Lanfranci,” in Migne, , Patrologia Latino vol. CL, col 57.Google Scholar; the story also occurs in Eadmer, , Vita Anselmi, p. 41Google Scholar, but without the association with Lanfranc.

3 E.g., Southern, R. W., St. Anselm and his Biographer (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 152, 160 and passim.Google Scholar

4 Laporte, Dom Jean, “St. Anselm et I Ordre Monastique,” Spicileguim Beccensis, I, 469Google Scholar. Anselm, St., Opera Omnia, ed. Schmitt, F. S. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1966), Epistle 148Google Scholar. All references to epistles are in Schmitt.

5 Eadmer, , Vita Anselmi, p. 63.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 50.

7 Porée, , Bec, I:161–62Google Scholar; Chibnall, p. 524.

8 Eadmer, , Vita Anselmi, p. 54.Google Scholar

9 Chibnall, pp. 522-23, 526. These foundations were Anselm's constant concern. He visited England in 1086, possibly to protect the rights of Bec houses during the Domesday survey. On this and other occasions he did his work so well that there was little litigation over the abbey's claims during the twelfth century: ibid., pp. 521-22, 529. See Dickinson, John C., “Anselm and the First Regular Canons in England,” Spicilegium Beccensis, I: 541–46.Google Scholar

10 Morgan, Marjorie, The English Lands of the Abbey of Bec (Oxford, 1946), pp. 139-46Google Scholar. Hugh, Earl of Chester, the Crispins, and the Clares (originally from Brionne, near Bec) are mentioned by Eadmer as close friends of Anselm, see Vita Anselmi, p. 27, note 1; Rule, Martin, ed., Historia Novorum (London, 1884), pp. 28-29. 30.Google Scholar

11 Eadmer, , Vita Anselmi, p. 63.Google Scholar

12 Epistle 165, to William of Beaumont, consecrated abbot of Bec. in 1094.

13 Eadmer, , Hisiuria Novorum, p. 23.Google Scholar

14 Laporte, p. 470; Epistle 156.

15 As Dom Laporte has shown (p. 470), Bec had a unique system of obedience. The monks owed obedience to the abbot and the abbot owed obedience to the monks collectively.

16 Epislle 198.

l7 Epistle 164; see below, p.

18 Porée, , Bec, I: 153Google Scholar, citing De Libertate Beccensis monasterii. The monks of Bec traditionally strove for freedom from archiépiscopal obedience. At the August, 1094 consecration of William of Beaumont, Anselm's successor as abbot of Bec, Prior Baudry. Anselm's intimate friend, led a delegation to the court of Duke Robert Cur-those and obtained a mandate from him ordering Archbishop William Bonne Arne not to require obedience from the new abbot. Porée, , Bec, I: 245–46.Google Scholar

19 Eadmer, , Historia Novorum, pp. 27–29.Google Scholar

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21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., p. 30.

24 Eadmer, , Vita Anselmi, pp. 64–65.Google Scholar

25 Eadmer, , Historia Novorum, pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., pp. 22-23: “How tactfully…[Lanfranc] dealt with William the Conqueror, so that…he was led for the redemption of his soul to restore to the church of Canterbury many of the lands which…had been taken from her. [Lanfranc]…has left an example of how zealously we should press on with good works while we can.…He was in very truth a great and invincible defender of the Church of Christ, a devoted Father of the whole of England, and so far as he was allowed to be so, a good shepherd to all its inhabitants to his life's end.”

27 When Lanfranc went to Rome to obtain his pallium as archbishop of Canterbury, Pope Alexander II, according to Eadmer, welcomed him as the primate of the other world, the father of his country, the primate of all Britain; and Anselm seems to have also had this view of his role as archbishop, just as Eadmer considers Anselm a continuator of Lanfranc's program: Eadmer, , Historia Novorum, p. 11Google Scholar. Cf. Chantor, Hugh, The History of the Church of York, ed. Johnson, Charles (London, 1961), p. 3.Google Scholar

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29 Anglo Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 1091.

30 David, C.W., Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy (Cambridge, 1920), p. 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Anglo Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 1094.

32 Epistle 151: “…et regis graliam, quae vobis neeessaria est. sine omni proficuo, immo cum damno maximo non perdatis, el mentem meam multis molestiis onustam onusiiorem dissensione vestra non faciatis.”

33 Vitalis, Orderie, Historia Ecclesiusiica, ed. le Prévost, A. (5 vols.; Paris. 1838–1855), III: 316.Google Scholar

34 Epistle 150.

35 Epistle 164.

36 Epistle 153.

37 of Malmesbury, William, Gesta Pontificum, Rolls Series (London, 1870), p. 78Google Scholar stipulates that in 1092 Anselm refrained from going to England for fear of being accused of ambition.

38 Epistle 159: “Quoniam in neutra parte deum volebam offendere, omnino dubium mihi esset quid magis deberem eligere, aut ad quid potius auxilium amicorum ex-petere. In qua re hoc unum et tutissimum, sicut mihi visum est, elegi consilium, ut—sicut scriptum est: ‘iacta cogitatum tuum in domino’—omnino me committerem divino moderamini et consilio.”

39 of Poitiers, William, Histoire de Guillaume le Conquérant, ed. Foreville, Raymonde (Paris, 1952), p. 216.Google Scholar

40 Epistle 198.