ABSTRACT
The history of the English Church in the Middle Ages is intimately bound up with that of warfare. The time an English church council dealt with matters relating to clergy and warfare it was the council of 1102, which apparently forbade abbots to dub to knighthood. There is some Anglo-Norman canonical evidence to support that view. Archbishop Lanfranc's canon law collection, Collectio Lanfranci, deals only once with the problem of militant clergy, and that in a canon of the Fourth Council of Toledo. Rebellion may define the edge of the legitimate for Lanfranc, but that does not help us with Ermenfrid of Sion's penitential Ordinances, which, prescribed penance only for the papally sanctioned victors, nor does it help us with some of the other Anglo-Norman prohibitions and restrictions. The canon to emerge is from the Council of Windsor in 1070, which prohibited clergy from bearing worldly weapons.
