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Biography

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Lanfranc was born in Pavia, in Lombardy in northern Italy, in the early eleventh century, into a family of civic standing; later tradition names his father as a magistrate of the city. Pavia was then a noted centre of legal study, and Lanfranc was trained there as a jurist, gaining a reputation in the secular law before he left Italy. In the 1030s he crossed the Alps into France. After a period of teaching, including at Avranches in Normandy, he entered the recently founded Benedictine monastery of Bec, whose first abbot was Herluin. There he made his monastic profession and, within a few years, was appointed prior of the house.

As prior of Bec, Lanfranc developed a school that drew students from across western Europe. Among those associated with Bec in this period were Anselm of Aosta, later his successor both as prior and as archbishop of Canterbury, and other men who became bishops and scholars. Lanfranc also entered the Eucharistic controversy of the mid-eleventh century, writing against Berengar of Tours in defence of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament; his treatise De corpore et sanguine Domini became an important statement of the emerging scholastic position. In 1063 Duke William of Normandy named him first abbot of the new ducal monastery of Saint-Étienne at Caen, a house Lanfranc organized and whose church he began to build.

After the Norman conquest of England, King William I secured Lanfranc’s appointment as archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, following the deposition of the English archbishop Stigand. Lanfranc was consecrated that year and thereafter served as the king’s principal ecclesiastical counsellor. He rebuilt Canterbury Cathedral after a destructive fire, introducing a large Romanesque church on a Norman plan. He held reforming councils that sought to enforce clerical celibacy, regulate the lives of monks and canons, and bring English church practice into closer alignment with continental norms. He asserted the primacy of the see of Canterbury over York, obtaining from Archbishop Thomas of York a profession of obedience, though the dispute over metropolitan rights continued in later generations. Lanfranc replaced a number of remaining Anglo-Saxon prelates with Norman or other continental churchmen and reorganized monastic communities attached to English cathedrals.

In the last years of William I’s reign Lanfranc remained a central figure in the government of church and kingdom. After the Conqueror’s death in 1087 he supported the succession of William Rufus in England. He died at Canterbury on 24 May 1089 and was buried in his cathedral. Lanfranc was never formally canonized by the papacy, but he was commemorated in some monastic calendars, particularly among Benedictines, often on 28 May. His reputation rests on his work as a teacher and theologian, as an abbot and monastic organizer, and as the principal architect of the post-Conquest English church under Norman rule.

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