Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY'S WRITING. SECULAR AND REGULAR CLERGY I. Relations of Church and State?2. The new monasticism and the hostility of seculars and regulars?3. Rise of orders of canons? 4. Cathedral chapters and collegiate churches?5. Episcopal households?6. The monastic orders?7. Hermits. 1. The influx of foreign clergy and monks, coming at a time when strong ecclesiastical movements were stirring on the Continent, brought to the church of the conquered country the breath of a new existence. The world of learning, with very few exceptions, was a world of ecclesiastics, and hence it is the life of the church that is known to us in fullest detail. Many hands were at work penning biographies of bishops, annals of religious houses, rules for the guidance of monastic daily life, and the records of the learned church have endured where the records of the unlearned laity have perished. We would gladly forfeit some contemporary lives of ecclesiastics for a single biography of a lay Norman baron, for what is lost is more desired than what is kept. But for good or ill, clerical and lay persons, whatever be the differences in their view of life, have always much humanity incommon, and after all the Norman king's bishops were likewise his barons. Not the most bitter opponent of lay " investiture " forewent the " barony " attaching to his see: that would have been negligent stewardship of the church's property. The mediaeval church was not prepared to measure its power in spiritual terms, but sought to increase its influence upon the state by secular means. Men saw the readiest means of access to spiritual power through temporal power, and failed to perceive that in this source of strength lay also a source of weakness. All the bishops and many of the abbots were the king's te...
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