William the ruler and warrior had now a short breathing-space. He
had doubtless come back from England more bent than ever on his
marriage with Matilda of Flanders. Notwithstanding the decree of a
Pope and a Council entitled to special respect, the marriage was
celebrated, not very long after William's return to Normandy, in
the year of the revolt of William of Arques. In the course of the
year 1053 Count Baldwin brought his daughter to the Norman frontier
at Eu, and there she became the bride of William. We know not what
emboldened William to risk so daring a step at this particular
time, or what led Baldwin to consent to it. If it was suggested by
the imprisonment of Pope Leo by William's countrymen in Italy, in
the hope that a consent to the marriage would be wrung out of the
captive pontiff, that hope was disappointed. The marriage raised
much opposition in Normandy. It was denounced by Archbishop Malger
of Rouen, the brother of the dispossessed Count of Arques. His
character certainly added no weight to his censures; but the same
act in a saint would have been set down as a sign of holy boldness.
Presently, whether for his faults or for his merits, Malger was
deposed in a synod of the Norman Church, and William found him a
worthier successor in the learned and holy Maurilius. But a
greater man than Malger also opposed the marriage, and the
controversy thus introduces us to one who fills a place second only
to that of William himself in the Norman and English history of the
time.

This was Lanfranc of Pavia, the lawyer, the scholar, the model
monk, the ecclesiastical statesman, who, as prior of the newly
founded abbey of Bec, was already one of the innermost counsellors
of the Duke. As duke and king, as prior, abbot, and archbishop,
William and Lanfranc ruled side by side, each helping the work of