Lanfranc of Canterbury

Lanfranc was born at Pavia in Lombardy about 1010, the son of a city magistrate, and trained in law. He crossed the Alps in his thirties, taught for a while in France, and then, according to the story told at his abbey, was robbed by bandits on the road near Rouen, left tied up in a wood overnight, and there decided to give up the world. He asked for the poorest monastery anyone could name and was sent to Bec, a house of a few monks under an illiterate former knight named Herluin.

He entered Bec about 1042. Within a few years he was running its school, and within twenty years Bec was the most famous school in Europe. Students came from Italy, Germany, and Normandy. One of them, a young man from Aosta named Anselm, arrived in 1059 because Lanfranc was there.

He also fought the theological battle of his generation. Berengar of Tours had argued that the bread and wine of the Eucharist remain bread and wine, and that the presence of Christ is figurative. Lanfranc answered him in De corpore et sanguine Domini, using the vocabulary of substance and accidents in a way that pointed toward the later doctrine of transubstantiation. Berengar was condemned. The argument, begun by Paschasius Radbertus two centuries earlier, had reached its next stage.

He fell out with Duke William of Normandy over the legality of William's marriage, was banished, met the duke on the road out, and talked his way back into favour so thoroughly that he ended up negotiating the papal dispensation. He became abbot of Saint-Étienne at Caen in 1063.

After Hastings, William made him archbishop of Canterbury in 1070. He was almost sixty.

He reorganized the English church from the ground up. He replaced most of the Anglo-Saxon bishops and abbots with Normans, separated church courts from secular ones, enforced clerical celibacy, held regular councils, and asserted Canterbury's primacy over York in a dispute that ran for centuries. He rebuilt Canterbury cathedral after a fire and wrote the Monastic Constitutions that governed English Benedictine life. He revised the text of the Latin Bible and of the church fathers used in England, correcting corrupted copies.

He also governed the kingdom as regent when William was in Normandy, and put down a rebellion in 1075.

He died on 28 May 1089. Four years later Anselm, his pupil, was made archbishop in his place.

Sources: Lanfranc, De corpore et sanguine Domini, Letters, and Monastic Constitutions; Eadmer, Historia novorum in Anglia; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. V; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).