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390 MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
that the Channel was no longer a moat. The first is in a sense
accidental; the last was a long/term result which continued for
more than a century; the direct reorganization must be con'
sidered first.
The large tract of north/western France invaded and settled
by the Northmen in the early part of the tenth century had for
some time remained pagan, but towards the end ofthat
century
it had developed a life
religious ofremarkable fecundity, radial
ing chiefly from the newly founded monasteries but affecting
all ranks, particularly that of the feudal baronage, in a virile
but in so many ways lawless and uncivilized society. Duke
William the Bastard had early appeared as a patron and pro-
tector of the monasteries, and as conqueror of England he set
the reform and wellbeing ofthe island Church in the forefront
of his programme, choosing for this purpose as archbishop of
Canterbury the celebrated Lombard lawyer and theologian
Lanfranc, then abbot of his new foundation at Caen. Both
William, who had grown to power in his remote self-contained
duchy, and Lanfranc, now a man of sixty years, who had
known only the Italy of the days before the reform, were in a
sense twenty or thirty years behind the
swiftly moving times, in
which a rejuvenated papacy was rapidly assuming effective
leadership and exploiting all its latent powers of action and
supervision and coercion. William, like the emperors Otto the
Great and Henry II, considered it his task, and his alone,
to control and reform the Church within his dominions;
Lanfranc, for his part, with the compilers of the earlier, pre-
Gregorian canonical collections, saw in the regional metropolis
tan the natural centre of authority and activity for the English
Church; the unorganized Anglo-Saxon Church, in which
bishops and abbots depended willingly upon the king, offered
no kind of
opposition either in theory or in
practice. Both
William and Lanfranc looked to Rome for approval and help,
especially in the first years of change, and both were in close
relationship with Alexander II; it need not be said that both
regarded the pope as the supreme fount of doctrine and
authority. When, however, the papacy under Gregory VII