William de Corbeil - Election As Archbishop

Election As Archbishop

After the death of Ralph d'Escures in October 1122, King Henry I decided to allow a free election, with the new primate to be chosen by the leading men of the realm, both ecclesiastical and secular. The monks of the cathedral chapter and the bishops of the kingdom disagreed on who should be appointed. The bishops insisted that it should not be a clerk (a non-monastic member of the clergy), but Canterbury's monastic cathedral chapter preferred a monk, and insisted that they alone had the right to elect the archbishop. However, only two bishops in England or Normandy were monks (Ernulf, Bishop of Rochester, and Serlo, Bishop of Séez), and no monks other than Anselm of Canterbury, Ernulf, and Ralph d'Escures, had been elected to an English or Norman see since 1091; recent precedent therefore favoured a clerk. King Henry sided with the bishops, and told the monks that they could elect their choice from a short list selected by the bishops. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the list contained no monks.

On 2 February or 4 February 1123, William was chosen from among four candidates to the see of Canterbury; the names of the three unsuccessful candidates are unknown. He appears to have been a compromise candidate, as he was at least a canon, if not the monk that the chapter had sought. William was the first Augustinian canon to become an archbishop in England, a striking break with the tradition that had favoured monks in the see of Canterbury. Although most contemporaries would not have considered there to be much of a distinction between monks and canons, William's election still occasioned some trepidation among the monks of the Canterbury chapter, who were "alarmed at the appointment, since he was a clerk".