Cur Deus Homo #231492

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, while William Rufus and Henry the First ruled England, was neither Norman nor Saxon, but Italian, born in 1033 at or near Aosta, the chief place in a mountain valley near the St Bernard Passes. His father, Gundulph, a Lombard settler in those parts, whose wife, Ermenburga, was related to the lords of part of the valley, bore a name well-known there. Anselm was thus of noble birth: he had one sister: also some uncles: of other kindred we know nothing. His mother was good and kind, and seems to have done her own work in awakening her child's religious aspirations: his father a rough man, harsh to his son. Before Anselm was fifteen he wished to be a monk: this his father would not allow, and even a dangerous sickness (for which Anselm had prayed) did not gain the desired end. After some time he appears to have been driven away by his father's unkindness, and with one companion, a clerk, he crossed the Alps by Mont Cenis: spent three years in Burgundy and France proper, and then went to Avranches, where the learned Lanfranc of Pavia had founded a school: him Anselm finally joined at the Monastery of Bec, in the eastern part of Normandy, where he was now prior.