Imagine a bull and a sheep harnessed together at the same yoke. What would happen? The most likely thing would be utter chaos as they struggle to separate and go off in their own directions. The plough would slice dangerously about behind them, no furrow would be straight and in the end the weaker animal would be trampled.
This is the scenario evoked by Anselm on the day he was, controversially, made Archbishop of Canterbury. “You are trying to harness together at the plough under one yoke an untamed bull and an old and feeble sheep. What will come of it?”
Anselm’s question is the beginning of a remarkable story.
What ‘came of it’, that is to say, what happened between the bull, William II, King of England, and the sheep, Archbishop Anselm, in the closing years of the 11th century, is one of the great untold sagas of the medieval period.
In the spring of 1093 King William II (Rufus) lies gravely ill. In a feeble state, he is persuaded by his barons and bishops to nominate Anselm, the famous theologian and churchman, as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. Unknowingly, he sets in motion a process that will drag on for years, involve them both in conflict and test their characters almost to breaking point.
Between this battling duo steps a third figure, the king’s infamous minister, Ranulf Flambard. A man without family or noble connections, working his way up through merit and political acumen to become the king’s chief minister and man of affairs, he is thrust into the role of ‘ploughman of the realm’ with the job of driving the impossibly yoked bull and sheep in the line of a straight furrow. Struggling to keep an effective government in place while pitching his wits against plots, disruptive romances, outside threats and an ongoing cash crisis, Ranulf Flambard strives to manage the ill-matched pair as they argue, dispute, quarrel, make up and fall out in a long drawn out battle lasting seven years.
Caught up in the political drama is Aefled and her provincial family who find their lives unexpectedly woven into the national thread when Aefled meets Edith, young daughter of the Scottish king who is being educated at the nunnery of Wilton. When Edith’s aunt, Christina, an inveterate enemy of the king, tries to force her to become a nun she turns to Aefled for help. Also at Wilton, living in internal exile, is Gunhild, the daughter of King Harold. Sidelined by the world as the living remnant of a former age, Gunhild gambles everything on one last chance of happiness. As events unfold, the lives and fates of these women become increasingly entangled with the affairs of the kingdom and, in the case of Gunhild, with one of the most astonishing love stories of the age.
The Remarkable Tale of the Bull and the Sheep brings a little known period to life. Inherently dramatic, peopled by larger-than-life characters, involving extraordinary happenings and incongruous episodes, these events, as the title suggests, really are remarkable.
Historical Characters in the Remarkable Tale of the Bull and the Sheep
Many of the characters will be known to people who love medieval history, some will be less well known, and all of them deserve to be more widely known. The ‘great three’ in particular. These are Ranulf Flambard, Archbishop Anselm and King William Rufus. These three great contemporaries spend most of their time at loggerheads, but they are all exceptional personalities, whose actions and decisions leave a mark on the government of church and state in the late eleventh century.
I have always thought that King William and Ranulf Flambard were maligned by the chroniclers and have suffered from a scurrilous reputation, largely because they constantly annoyed and upset the men who wrote the chronicles – men of the church, monks, priests, sometimes even high office-holders. And it is true there was little about either King William of Ranulf Flambard that would make them beloved of the church.
The exact opposite happens in the case of Anselm. His reputation is never in doubt. By the time he is nominated Archbishop at the beginning of the book, he has been Abbot of Bec in Normandy for the last thirty years. He already has a reputation as a sage and theologian and is widely known in Benedictine houses in England and Normandy. Not only that, he has in his household a writer, a disciple called Eadmer, whose dearest wish is to write the biography of a saint. I saw the relationship between Eadmer and Anselm as crucial to the understanding of both characters.
My standpoint was that for both of them the relationship was extremely complex: fraught, needy, very close, often uncomfortable, mutually demanding but in the end enduring.