The struggle for primacy

One of the unusual features of the Church in England is that it has always had only two archbishops, ever since St. Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury from 601, began the work of converting England to Christianity.

After the Norman conquest, when the Church was more centrally governed that before, it became positively embarrassing that neither the archbishop of Canterbury nor the archbishop of York would give precedence to each other. As early as 1071 the vigorous Lanfranc of Canterbury had tried to establish his ascendancy by obtaining a papal judgement that he and his successors should consecrate the archbishops of York and receive oaths of obedience from them. However, in 1118, Archbishop Thurstan of York refused to submit, inaugurating a long and bitter battle between the two cathedral churches. Some of the documents the Canterbury clergy produced in favour of their case were such blatant forgeries they made papal officials 'smile, turn up their noses and laugh aloud'.

In the reign of Henry II the controversy became more acute, above all when the king's savage conflict with Thomas Becket led him to favour the latter's counterpart at York, Roger of Pont l'Evêque. Archbishop Roger actually crowned the heir to the English throne, the young Henry, at Westminster Abbey on 14 June 1170, 'against the disire and opinion of almost everyone in the kingdom'. This direct challenge to a traditional prerogative of the archbishops of Canterbury did more than anything else to force Becket out of his self-imposed exile in France and bring him home to martyrdom in Canterbury cathedral at the end of the year.

However, this was one dispute which even Becket's murder could not resolve; six years later (in 1176) there was a violent brawl when the partisans of Archbishop Roger tried to eject the archbishop of Canterbury by force from his seat at the right hand of a visiting papal legate. Only in the 14th century was this long-running and at times hilarious controversy brought to a compromise solution, whereby the archbishop of Canterbury gained precedence as 'Primate of all England' and the archbishop of York had to be satisfied with the title of 'Primate of England'.