Chapter V: Anselm of Canterbury Hailed as British Pope

In any event, from Augustine’s arrival to the Reformation, the English never ceased to assert

the independence of their Church from the See of Rome. They generally treated the Pope with respect and occasionally followed his counsel ... when they’d requested it. Otherwise, he was —sometimes politely, and sometimes not so politely—told to keep his nose out of their affairs.

At the end of the 7th Century, for instance, Wilfred, the Bishop of York, asked the Pope to intervene in his quarrel with Theodore, the Archbishop of Canterbury. When the matter came up before the Witanagemot—a Saxon cross between a Synod and Parliament—the Church’s Clergy and Laity rejected the Pope’s adjudication. The Witan said, in effect, “Who is this Pope and what are his decrees? What have they to do with us, or we with them?” By way of an answer, they burned the Papal parchment and clapped Wilfred in prison for having the temerity to try to insinuate an outsider into a domestic dispute. (A witan was the council of the Anglo-Saxon kings in England; its essential duty was to advise the king on all matters on which he chose to ask its opinion. It attested his grants of land to churches or laymen, consented to his issue of new laws or new statements of ancient custom, and helped him deal with rebels and persons suspected of disaffection. Its composition and time of meeting were determined by the king’s pleasure.)

In A.D. 747, the principle was reasserted again—and just as pointedly. It was proposed at the Witan to refer difficult questions to the Bishop of Rome—as primus inter pares. The Witan, however, refused to entertain any such suggestion and at once declared it would submit only to the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

In 1066, the Pope supported William the Conqueror’s attempt to seize the English crown in the hope that William would bring the British Church under papal control. With this in mind, the Pope blessed William’s efforts almost as a crusade. Once England had been conquered, however, William was quickly apprised of the Anglican Church’s independent status—not only by the Saxon Bishops, but by Normans, like William’s own brother, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.

“Thy legate Hubert, Holy Father, hath called upon me in thy name to take the oath of fealty to thee and thy successors ...” William wrote to the Pope. “Homage to thee I have not chosen, nor do I choose, to do. I never made a promise to that effect, neither do I find that it was performed by my predecessors to thine.”

This cannot be dismissed as a form of personal self-aggrandizement. It was clearly the assertion of what William believed to be an ancient right. While he never swerved in his refusal to pay homage to the Pope in his position as King of England, he apparently did so quite willingly as Duke of Normandy.

The popes, themselves, seem to have been well aware of the validity of the English Church’s claims to independence. When Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, arrived at the Council of Bari in 1098, Pope Urban II cried out: “Anselm, father and master, where art thou?” As Anselm was ushered to a seat beside the Pope, Urban explained the reason for the English Primate’s special honor, saying: “We include him indeed in our œcumene, but as Pope of another œcumene.”

The word œcumene—the root of our modern word “economy”—translates as “jurisdiction” in both the imperial and the ecclesiastical sense. Thus, Urban was saying that Anselm, while in Communion with Rome, was, in fact, patriarch of a wholly independent jurisdiction.

Despite Urban II’s candor, the English Church was constantly obliged to reassert its independence. In the 12th Century, Warelwast, Bishop of Exeter, was dispatched to Rome with an official protest against papal meddling in English affairs. The letter explained that the Pontiff was well aware that “the Church and realm of England occupied a different position from the continental kingdoms and Churches, and had always been independent of Papal jurisdiction.”