Roger, 1107—1189. 175 
consecrate the three bishops designate.’ But the archbishop refused ; 
at all events with regard to those appointed to Sarum and Hereford. 
The king then called on Gerard, Archbishop of York, to consecrate 
them. He was ready to consecrate anybody; but scruples on the 
part of the bishops designate prevailed. Reinhelm, appointed to 
Hereford, at once gave back “the staff and ring” to the king.? 
William Giffard suffered banishment and spoiling of his goods, rather 
than allow a wrongful consecration. Of Roger, named to Sarum, 
it is said, “predicanda prudentia ita rem temperavit, ut nec Regem 
irritaret nec Archiepiscopo injuriam faceret ;’’* that is (freely tran- 
slated) he managed matters with such singular prudence, that he 
neither irritated the king nor injured the cause of the archbishop.* 
And these few words of Malmesbury are really a key to the character 
of Bishop Roger, for he, no less than Anselm, had been present at 
the Lateran Council when investitures from the king had been 
condemned. He was literally a man who tried “to serve two mas- 
ters.” Never, in truth, was there a greater contrast than between 
Roger and his predecessor Osmund. ‘The one of noble birth and a 
descendant of kings, the other of humble unknown parentage and a 
simple child of fortune. The one essentially a saintly man, giving 
himself wholly to the duties of his high calling ; the other a wordly 
minded man, all through his life the crafty time-serving statesman. 
Roger was nevertheless a man of undoubted genius, “ a fair type of 
those Norman bishops of the twelfth century, promoted from the 
temporal service of the king, able statesmen, and often magnificent 
1 See Church’s Life of Anselm, 263, 267. 
2 All Bishoprics at the first were merely donative by the delivery ofa ‘staff 
and ring” by the king. ‘They do not seem to have been elective till the reign 
of King John. See Dean Pierce ‘‘ King’s Sovereign Rights,” p. 4. 
3 Gest. Pontif., 110. 
4The whole dispute on the subject of investitures is graphically told by Dean 
Church in his Life of Anselm. See also Freeman’s Norman Conquest, v. 218— 
a 225, where it is well said that ‘‘ the difference between Anselm and Henry I. 
was a question not of abstract right or wrong, but between the law of England 
and the innovations of Rome.” The king was very firm in resisting the claims 
of the Pope according to the chronicler.—‘‘ Quid mihi de meis cum Papa? 
Que antecessores mei hoc in regno possiderunt mei sunt ”—such are said to have 
been among his asseverations. 
