19 Facts About Lanfranc

Lanfranc, OSB was a celebrated Italian jurist who renounced his career to become a Benedictine monk at Bec in Normandy.

Lanfranc served successively as prior of Bec Abbey and abbot of St Stephen's Abbey in Caen, Normandy and then as Archbishop of Canterbury in England, following its conquest by William the Conqueror.

Lanfranc was born in the early years of the 11th century at Pavia, where later tradition held that his father, Hanbald, held a rank broadly equivalent to magistrate.

Lanfranc was trained in the liberal arts, at that time a field in which northern Italy was famous.

Lanfranc was then persuaded by Abbot Herluin to open a school at Bec to relieve the monastery's poverty.

Lanfranc's pupils were drawn not only from France and Normandy, but from Gascony, Flanders, Germany and Italy.

Lanfranc took up the task with the greatest zeal, although Berengar had been his personal friend; he was the protagonist of orthodoxy at the Church Councils of Vercelli, Tours and Rome.

In 1066 Lanfranc became the first Abbot of the Abbey of Saint-Etienne at Caen in Normandy, a monastery dedicated to Saint Stephen which the duke had supposedly been enjoined to found as a penance for his disobedience to the Holy See.

Henceforward Lanfranc exercised a perceptible influence on his master's policy.

At this council Lanfranc obtained the confirmation of his primacy that he sought; nonetheless he was never able to secure its formal confirmation by the papacy, possibly as a result of the succession of Pope Gregory VII to the papal throne in 1073.

Lanfranc assisted William in maintaining the independence of the English Church; and appears at one time to have favoured the idea of maintaining a neutral attitude on the subject of the quarrels between papacy and empire.

Lanfranc obtained the king's permission to deal with the affairs of the Church in synods.

Lanfranc accelerated the process of substituting Normans for Englishmen in all preferments of importance; and although his nominees were usually respectable, it cannot be said that all of them were better than the men whom they superseded.

On several occasions when William I was absent from England Lanfranc acted as his vicegerent.

Waltheof, 1st Earl of Northumberland, one of the rebels, soon lost heart and confessed the conspiracy to Lanfranc, who urged Roger, the earl of Hereford to return to his allegiance, and finally excommunicated him and his adherents.

Lanfranc interceded for Waltheof's life and to the last spoke of the earl as an innocent sufferer for the crimes of others; he lived on terms of friendship with Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester.

Lanfranc exacted promises of just government from Rufus, and was not afraid to remonstrate when the promises were disregarded.

In 1931, the Archbishop Lanfranc School was opened in Croydon, where he had resided at Croydon Palace.

Lanfranc is remembered in road names in London and Worthing, West Sussex.