SECTION IV
THE CHURCH
effects of •the Norman Conquest upon the English
* church were many and fundamental. It not only
brought the primitive, insular church into closer touch
with continental conditions, but it did this at a time
when centralising tendencies, the exaltation of the papacy,
separation of church and state, and the strengthening of
the former at the expense of the latter were the ruling
influences at Rome and at many ecclesiastical centres.
The Cluniac movement had reached its height and was
soon to be surpassed by the Hildebrandine principles,
which, carried to their logical conclusions, would have
made Europe a theocracy. Hildebrand had not become
Gregory VII. in IO66,1 but was, and had been for some
years, the most influential man in the Roman curia* It
was a time of exceptional opportunity for the growth of
papal influence in Europe, and Hildebrand knew how to
take advantage of it. In France, Spain, Hungary, Bo-
hemia, and even Scandinavia, local conditions were most
shrewdly used for spreading Cluniac ideas, and especially
for emphasising the authority of the pope—where possible,
in the concrete form of a papal overlordship of the feudal
type; where not, in any form that presented itself.2
Most significant at just this time were the papal rela-
tions with the Normans who were establishing them-
selves in southern Italy. In 1059, P°Pe Nicholas II.
1 He became pope in 1073.
a See Stephens, Hildebrand and his Times, eh. vHi.
125