CHAP. III - The crown in conflict with Church and Nobles

Summary

Highly as we may estimate the due appreciation and expression of those objective ideas, which are bound up with the culture of the human race, still the spiritual life of man is built up not so much on a devout and docile receptivity of these ideas as on their free and subjective recognition, which modifies while it accepts, and necessarily passes through a phase of conflict and opposition.

In England the authority both of Church and State now came forward with far more strength than before. The royal power was a continuation of the sovereignty inherited from Anglo-Saxon times, but, leaning on its continental resources, and supported by those who had taken part in the Conquest, it developed itself much more durably. The clergy of the land were far more closely and systematically bound to the Papacy; thus it had become more learned and more active. The one sword helped the other; just at this very time, the King and the Archbishop of Canterbury were depicted as the two strong steers that drew the plough of England.

But yet, below all this there existed a powerful element of opposition. After the new order of things had existed more than eighty years, among a portion of the Anglo-Saxon population the design was started of putting a violent end to it, of destroying at one blow all those foreigners who seemed its representatives, just as the Danes had all been murdered on one day.