I - GILBERT'S HOME AT BEC

Summary

When the Conqueror came to be crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day, 1066, he was welcomed by Abbot Edwin whose contact with the Normans of Edward's court had prepared him for the new regime. After Edwin's death the king gave the abbey to one Geoffrey from Jumièges, who misruled it from about 1071 to 1075, when at Lanfranc's advice he was sent back in disgrace to his old monastery. The next abbot was chosen with more care. Vitalis, abbot of Bernay, had raised his abbey ‘from little to great,’ as William says in writing to demand consent to his appointment from his superior, John the abbot of Fécamp. Of Vitalis all that we know is good. He secured by the king's aid the estates of the abbey, some of which had been jeopardised in the recent changes; he seems to have pressed forward the new monastic buildings; and doubtless he enforced the improved discipline which the great reformer William of Dijon had left as the heritage of Fécamp. But he was already an elderly man, and he died, as it would seem, in the summer of 1085.

If Vitalis had come to Westminster late in life, towards the close of an energetic and successful career, the next abbot, Gilbert Crispin, was in the full strength of his manhood at the time of his appointment, and was destined to rule the monastery for thirty-two years. He must have been about forty when he became abbot of Westminster.