s simply to mark in incident after incident which has
occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom
it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the
literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm.

Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of
the house itself. It is doubtful whether we can date the residence of
the Archbishops of Canterbury at Lambeth, which was then a manor house
of the see of Rochester, earlier than the reign of Eadward the
Confessor. But there was a significance in the choice of the spot as
there was a significance in the date at which the choice was made. So
long as the political head of the English people ruled, like AElfred or
AEthelstan or Eadgar, from Winchester, the spiritual head of the English
people was content to rule from Canterbury. It was when the piety of the
Confessor and the political prescience of his successors brought the
Kings finally to Westminster that the Archbishops were permanently
drawn to their suffragan's manor house at Lambeth. The Norman rule gave
a fresh meaning to their position. In the new course of national history
which opened with the Conquest the Church was called to play a part
greater than she had ever known before. Hitherto the Archbishop had been
simply the head of the ecclesiastical order--a representative of the
moral and spiritual forces on which government was based. The Conquest,
the cessation of the great Witenagemots in which the nation, however
imperfectly, had till then found a voice, turned him into a Tribune of
the People.

Foreigner though he might be, it was the Primate's part to speak for the
conquered race the words it could no longer utter. He was in fact the
permanent leader (to borrow a modern phrase) of a Constitutional
Opposition; and in addition to the older religious forces which he
wielded he wielded a popular and democratic force which held the new
King and the new baronage in check. It was he who received from the
sovereign whom he crowned the solemn oath that he would rule not by his
own will, but according to the customs, or as we should say now, the
traditional constitution of the realm. It was his to call on the people
to declare whether they chose him for their king, to receive the
thundered "Ay, ay," of the crowd, to place the priestly unction on
shoulder and breast, the royal crown on brow. To watch over the
observance of the covenant of th