The king and the archbishop

AFTER the Norman Conquest it was only with the appointment of a new abbot that the king or the archbishop of Canterbury normally intervened in the management of Evesham abbey. The archbishop had the right to correct faults at Evesham by virtue of the supposed privileges of Pope Constantine dated 709 and 713 but he was not actually called upon to exercise the power of correction until 1197, and even then he proved to be so irresolute as to achieve no beneficial effect. Between the death of Abbot Æthelwig (1078) and the fall of Abbot Norreis (1213) the abbots continued to be appointed by the king as patron and feudal overlord, but he does not seem to have taken a personal interest in the process; he was content to follow advice, particularly that of the archbishop. Under an agreement of 1107 the king could no longer appoint the abbot of any house unilaterally, but it remained his prerogative as overlord to take homage from a new abbot for his estates, and that gave the king the opportunity to delay his acceptance of homage and in the mean time to enjoy the abbey's temporalities (its income from secular sources). It was undoubtedly Lanfranc who had nominated Abbot Walter in 1078, and Lanfranc's successors continued to nominate until 1190. The monks were allowed to go through the formality of an election in chapter and they would naturally have elected one of their own number, but they knew that the king would not confirm their choice if they did not elect the archbishop's nominee. Thus all the abbots of Evesham appointed during the twelfth century were brought in from elsewhere. An accident of timing meant that there was one exception to that: following Walter's death in 1104, he was succeeded by an Evesham monk, Maurice; Archbishop Anselm was in voluntary exile from 1103 to 1106 and could not present the king and the Evesham chapter with another candidate.

Although all the other twelfth-century abbots were outsiders to the Evesham chapter, only one of them may have come straight from the continent. That was Maurice's successor Robert, who had been a monk of Jumièges in Normandy4 and arrived at Evesham c.1121.