had lost half his army in a five-month campaign that achieved few military objectives. He
would serve again in Aquitaine, but his main concerns after 1373 lay outside France.
John Bell Henneman, Jr.
Fowler, Kenneth. The King’s Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster (1310–
1361). New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969.
Sherborne, James. “John of Gaunt, Edward III’s Retinue, and the French Campaign of 1369.” In
Kings and Nobles in the Later Middle Ages: A Tribute to Charles Ross, ed. Ralph A. Griffiths
and James Sherborne. New York: St. Martin, 1986, pp. 41–61.
LANFRANC OF BEC
(ca. 1010–1089). Born into a good family in Pavia, Lanfranc was educated in that city
and more generally in northern Italy. He left Italy for France while still a young man and
made his reputation as an itinerant teacher in the area around Avranches. In 1042, he
entered the new monastery at Bec (founded 1041); he was abbot of Saint-Étienne, Caen,
in 1063; in 1070, he was made archbishop of Canterbury. He had a dual reputation, first
as a teacher and scholar and later as a brilliant administrator and leader.
His scholarship falls into two periods, before and after his entry into Bec. The earlier
works, no longer extant, are on the Trivium; after 1042, he devoted himself to theology,
writing commentaries on the Psalms and Pauline epistles that circulated widely. About
1063, he wrote a treatise De sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi, against the
opinions of Berengar of Tours’s De eucharistia, and to which Berengar replied in De
sacra coena. Berengar’s ideas caused widespread antagonism and were finally
condemned by Pope Gregory VII in 1079. The issue centers on the changes taking place
in the bread and wine of the eucharist in order for them to become the body and blood of
Christ. Both Berengar and Lanfranc believed in the Real Presence, but they differed on
the necessity and type of any change in the elements, Berengar insisting that no material
alteration was needed and Lanfranc arguing for outward identity concealing inner grace.
The question was compounded by difficulties of language: no clearer statement of the
central issue was to be possible until the introduction of Aristotelian notions of substance
and accident in the 13th century.
Lanfranc’s leadership of the school at Bec made it into one of the most famous of its
day, and pupils included Anselm of Bec, Ivo of Chartres, and Guitmund of Aversa (later
Pope Alexander II). He was a valued counselor to Duke William of Normandy (the
Conqueror) despite having declared William’s marriage invalid.
Lanfranc was a great holder of synods (in 1075, 1076, 1078, 1081), which he used to
promulgate canon law, and he was the first to create separate courts of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction. His legal turn of mind (he seems to have practiced or at least studied civil
law in Pavia) was coupled with a traditionalist viewpoint, so that his outlook reminds us
of Carolingian attitudes and practices rather than any innovation. The collection of canon
law, the so-called Col-lectio Lanfranci, which Lanfranc brought to Canterbury from Bec,
has an old-fashioned cast, in contrast to the Collection in Seventy-Four Titles
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