A Collection of the Laws and Canons of the Church of England (Volume 2); From Its First Foundation to the Conquest, and from the Conquest to the Reign of King Henry VIII Translated Into English with Explanatory Notes in Two Volumes (Paperback)

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: A.D. MLXX. Preface To Laxfkanc's Canons At Winchester. It has been affirmed by some of late years, that William duke of Normandy did not conquer England, after all our ancestors for five centuries had yielded themselves to him and his successors as a conquered people; all, I mean, except the men of Kent, who, by the invention of one of their monks, did for many ages enjoy the honour of being unconquered. But in the last age, an antiquary of our own, and the greatest that our country or perhaps any other had then produced, I mean Mr. Somner, divested us too of this glory, by detecting the fiction of Spot, the monk; and yet now it is become a fashionable opinion, that "William the First was so far from conquering Kent, that he conquered no part of England. My reader will not expect that I should determine whether he conquered the civil state or nation, for this might perhaps be construed to my prejudice, as if I were a meddler in politics. But whether he made a conquest of the nation or not, it is certain he conquered the bishops and clergy, and treated them as his captives; he destroyed many of their churches, he stripped most or all of them of their rich furniture; he iitid a taxation of men and arms to serve him in his expeditions upon the lands of the bishops and prelates, and obliged them to secular services unknown to their predecessors; he caused many churches with their tithes to be converted into lay fees for the maintaining his military officers and men of arms; the tithes of other churches which were served mostly hy English priests, he caused to be appropriated to abbeys, which were governed, if not filled with Normans. He caused Stigand, archbishop of Canterbury, to be deposed in a synodical form: the crimes alleged against him were, first, holding the see of...