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William conveyed him the news of the previous defeat the king immediately withdrew. The object of Henry in this was to recover the Vexin which he had ceded to Normandy, as the price of its early support. All the attempts of the king failed, and William remained in possession of the disputed province, contented with repelling, and scorning to take vengeance upon, so feeble a suzerain.

Henry had taken a singular, but very natural, precaution for the time. This was to procure for himself a queen who could not possibly be within the limits of consanguinity forbidden by the Church. To secure this great immunity he espoused a Russian Princess, Anne, daughter of the Czar, Jaraslaw. This queen in 1053 bore Philip, whom his father caused to be crowned with great solemnity in the year 1059.

This ceremony has been circumstantially described and recorded by the Archbishop of Rheims himself, who was the principal officiator, and who wrote the record in order to demonstrate the indefeasible right of the metropolitan of Rheims to crown the French monarchs. -a right derived from St. Remi, who crowned Clovis, and from Pope Hormisdas, who in the sixth century conferred this privilege. The coronation oath was that the future king would defend the clergy, a fitting one for the early Capets. The nobles present were the Duke of Aquitaine, the deputies of the Duke of Burgundy, of the Count of Flanders, of Anjou, of Valois, of Vermandois, of Soissons, of Auvergne, De la Marche, Angoulême and Limoges. The ceremony being over, "Then all, great and small, knights and people, gave with unanimous voice their approbation, and cried three times, We approve and decree that it should be so."

Henry survived his son's coronation but a year.

Philip the First was, as much as his sire and grandsire, a stranger to the great events which marked his

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reign. The conquest of England by the Normans, the CHAP. struggle commenced by Gregory the Seventh to dispossess the feudal noblesse, and its royal or imperial chiefs of the hold which they had taken both of the possessions and the supremacy of the Church, the simultaneous effort of the civic class to shake off the same feudal yoke, and finally the reckless imprudence of the nobles to risk their persons and squander their resources in the attempt to conquer the Holy Land-in these Philip took no part.

William of Normandy demanded aid in his expedition against England, promising in return to do homage for that kingdom, should he succeed. The councillors of the young king and Baldwin his guardian declined to engage in an enterprise so hazardous, which would provoke lasting enmity in England if unsuccessful, and if successful would raise the Dukes of Normandy far above the Kings of France. Adventurers and nobles from all parts flocked notwithstanding to William's standard, who was thus enabled to land in England at the head of fifty thousand men. The numbers as well as the quality and conduct of the army which Harold opposed to them, is a subject of dispute amongst British historians. But the war was more a personal than a national struggle. It was the Normans who subsequently rendered it such by their rapacity. And had not the English been far behind their French neighbours and rivals in the development of feudalism, in the erection and maintenance of fortresses and strongholds, the conquest might not have been accomplished.

Whilst the Anglo-Norman kingdom was in course of formation on one side of Philip's infant and quiet realm of France, an Italian monk conceived, and set himself to accomplish the more gigantic task of resuscitating the western empire with all its supremacy and pretensions, in favour of those pontiffs who had become seated on the throne of the Cæsars. The rivalry between lay

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CHAP. and ecclesiastical authority, between the noble and the prelate, the knight and the monk, had never ceased during the dark ages, the iron necessities of the time subjecting and dispossessing the churchmen, who still never gave up the fight. What menaced the independence and rights as well as the influence of the clergy, was the universal establishment of feudalism, which monopolised the land, portioning it out with the population fixed upon it exclusively for the purposes of military defence. Monasteries and prelacies did not escape; both became fiefs, and often military fiefs. As monarchy declined, and as the power and wealth of Western Europe became divided amongst a baronial aristocracy, prelates, and even abbots managed to take rank as independent nobles, with their own rights of jurisdiction. But this rendered church dignities a more valuable prize, and the younger scions of the aristocracy grasped them.

The comprehension of the ranks and property of the Church in the feudal system became facilitated by the growing habit of offering and accepting monied payment in lieu of military service. It was the most natural way in which the clergy, like the townsfolk, might contribute to the defence of the state and the power of the sovereign. Pecuniary payments, however, led the way to great abuses. There could be no great extortion or oppression in requiring a greater number of soldiers. than a territory can furnish. But even feudalism was ingenious in the extortion of money. An ecclesiastic newly appointed to a benefice could not refuse to show his gratitude for the boon by the abandonment of the first year's revenue. Candidates were soon found

to outbid each other. And the revenues of the Church were thus diverted to lay lords, and made the subject of sale and purchase. The respect and reverence of the population were withheld from a clergy which thus acquired authority, and the interests of religion

were menaced to a degree which shocked the pious monarch as well as the zealous ecclesiastic. In the hour of peril the Church found and sent forth one of its most redoubtable champions. This was Hildebrand, whose keen and ardent spirit saw in the gradual increase of lay ascendancy the fatal result of a secularisation and absorption of the clergy.

This remarkable man was the son of a carpenter in the neighbourhood of Sienna. He received his education in one of his country's convents, and rose to be prior of the monastery of Cluny, in France. He could not have been in a better position for experiencing as well as seeing the spoliation and the oppression of the clergy. Whilst other prelates saw a remedy for this in the clergy becoming feudal chiefs, and even warriors, Hildebrand conceived that it were better to arm the clergy with a moral power, to separate them completely from secular society, and organise them into a spiritual militia under an ecclesiastical head. Hildebrand's idea was to enforce the celibacy of the clergy as well as that of the monks; to denounce simony and all compacts with lay lords for the holding or appropriation of benefices; to rally round the Papal Chair, and make use of its protection and its arms to defend the cause and independence of the Church.

Fortunately for the inauguration of such a scheme, there was an emperor zealous against simony and approving ecclesiastical resistance to it. By the authority of this emperor, Bruno, archbishop of Toul, was elected Pope, and on his way to Italy sojourned for a time at Cluny. Hildebrand's views agreed with those of the new Pontiff, whom he persuaded not to owe his election to an imperial fiat, but to cause himself to be re-elected by the clergy and people of Rome. Bruno followed the advice, at which the emperor did not take umbrage. Hildebrand, in consequence, became powerful at the court of Rome, and attained, first as minister,

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CHAP. and subsequently as Pope Gregory the Seventh, the power of realising his views.

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How could he hope to emancipate the prelates or clergy, whilst the Popedom itself and the Italian hierarchy were in the appointment of the emperor? Hildebrand's first care was to institute the mode of electing the Pontiff by the cardinals. And his efforts were then directed towards making the investiture of all European prelates depend upon the Holy See, and not upon either king or emperor. Could Gregory have limited such an effort to Italy, and invoked nationality in support of it, he might, by a spiritual emancipation of his native land, have proceeded to vindicate the just independence of the Transalpine churches. But Gregory and Italy were blended in one jurisdiction; there was no freeing the one without attacking the other. The enormous pretensions of the Emperor of Germany to wield the traditional right of the Cæsars, necessitated the putting forth of claims all as extravagant by the Popes. And thus Gregory and his successors were led to oppose spiritual to imperial Cæsardom.

The struggle, although the important one of the epoch, we are not called upon to trace or to narrate. It was not the force of the Papal storm, but merely its subsidiary showers that fell upon France; and whilst the throne of the German emperor was shattered by it, the humble seat of the kings of France grew loftier and firmer. The Henries and the Philips were, indeed, of not sufficient importance and weight to attract the concentrated hostility of Rome. The great dioceses were independent of the kings. And in the councils, which Hildebrand and other Popes or legates held in France to eradicate and put down simony, it was not so much against the king as the many-headed aristocracy of France that it was necessary to fulminate. Philip indeed, like all the prudent potentates