[3] Lanfranc was trained in the liberal arts, at that time a field in which northern Italy was famous (there is little or no evidence to support the myth that his education included much in the way of Civil Law, and none that links him with Irnerius of Bologna as a pioneer in the renaissance of its study).

He took up the task with the greatest zeal, although Berengar had been his personal friend; he was the protagonist of orthodoxy at the Church Councils of Vercelli (1050), Tours (1054) and Rome (1059).

Later tradition told that while he was Prior of Bec he opposed the non-canonical marriage of Duke William with Matilda of Flanders (1053) and carried matters so far that he incurred a sentence of exile.

In 1066 Lanfranc became the first Abbot of the Abbey of Saint-Étienne at Caen in Normandy, a monastery dedicated to Saint Stephen which the duke had supposedly been enjoined to found as a penance for his disobedience to the Holy See.

William adopted the Cluniac programme of ecclesiastical reform, and obtained the support of Rome for his English expedition by assuming the attitude of a crusader against schism and corruption.

It was Alexander II, possibly a pupil of Lanfranc's and certainly a close friend, who gave the Norman Conquest the papal benediction—a notable advantage to William at the moment, but subsequently the cause of serious embarrassments.

His first difficulties were with Thomas of Bayeux, Archbishop-elect of York, (another former pupil) who asserted that his see was independent of Canterbury and claimed jurisdiction over the greater part of the English Midlands.

[10] Lanfranc, during a visit which he paid the pope for the purpose of receiving his pallium, obtained an order from Alexander that the disputed points should be settled by a council of the English Church.

[4] Lanfranc accelerated the process of substituting Normans for Englishmen in all preferments of importance; and although his nominees were usually respectable, it cannot be said that all of them were better than the men whom they superseded.

[4] Lanfranc's greatest political service to the Conqueror was rendered in 1075, when he detected and foiled the conspiracy which had been formed by the earls of Norfolk and Hereford.

He interceded for Waltheof's life and to the last spoke of the earl as an innocent sufferer for the crimes of others; he lived on terms of friendship with Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester.

[4] On the death of the Conqueror in 1087 Lanfranc secured the succession for William Rufus, in spite of the discontent of the Anglo-Norman baronage; and in 1088 his exhortations induced the English militia to fight on the side of the new sovereign against Odo of Bayeux and the other partisans of Duke Robert.

Notwithstanding some obvious moral and intellectual defects, he was the most eminent and the most disinterested of those who had co-operated with William I in riveting Norman rule upon the English Church and people.

[4] The efforts of Christ Church Canterbury to secure him the status of saint seem to have had only spasmodic and limited effect beyond English Benedictine circles.

However, in the period after the Council of Trent, Lanfranc's name was included in the Roman Martyrology, and in the current edition is commemorated as a 'Blessed' (beatus) on 28 May.

His On the Body and Blood of the Lord is translated (along with Guitmund of Aversa's tract on the same matter) in volume 10 of the Fathers of the Church Medieval Continuation (Washington, DC, 2009).