The strong hand of the Norman kings had kept the English Church in the old groove, in which they considered it should remain, as an integral part of the Church as a whole; but the Church as they conceived it was the Church as it had been at the beginning of the eleventh century, not as it actually was. Many ecclesiastics acquiesced in the royal conception, but quite a number, and those among the best, felt the control of Henry I to be a tyranny and longed to be free from it. This, though it had not been evident before, became so immediately after his death. A weak ruler and a disputed succession gave them their opportunity, and the claim is emphatically pressed for the freedom of the English Church. What, then, was this claim? What is implied by the “freedom of the Church”? To modern minds it means freedom from State control, and, as a consequence of that, the freedom of self-government possessed by an independent, and in this case, national Church. This is the way that many people view the claim put forward in the twelfth century; this it is that makes Becket appear to them as a national hero. But the claim was not really for freedom in that sense, though certainly freedom from lay control was in the very essence of the claim. It had begun, more humbly, as an appeal for freedom from particular abuses, the special innovations of a deleterious nature that had been introduced.