The abbey was enriched with ornaments, with
possessions, and with noble inmates. Religion and learning increased;
property of all kinds abounded; and the monks, who but a few years
before, could scarcely command sufficient ground for the site of their
own building, now saw their estates extend for many miles in a
lengthening line."--Promotion followed the fame of Lanfranc, who soon
became abbot of the royal monastery of St. Stephen, at Caen, and thence
was translated to the archiepiscopal see of Canterbury.
It was the rare good fortune of Bec, that the abbey furnished two
successive metropolitans to the English church, both of them selected
for their erudition, Lanfranc and Anselm. It is not a little remarkable,
too, that both were Italians. Lanfranc, whilst archbishop of Canterbury,
presided in the year 1077, at the dedication of the third church built
at Bec. We may judge how far the abbey had at that time increased in
consequence; for five bishops, one of them brother to the Conqueror,
honored the ceremony with their presence; and the nobles and ladies of
France, Normandy, and England crowded to the spot, to refresh their
bodies by the pleasures of the festival, and their souls by endowments
to the convent.
In the fifteenth century, when our Henry Vth brought his victorious
armies into France, the monks of Bec were reduced to a painful
alternative.
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