The Norman Conquest of England in the fall of 1066 resulted in religious as well as political upheaval. Although little apparently changed in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Hastings, within four years papal legates, with William the Conqueror's approval, had convened a council at which a handful of Anglo- Saxon bishops and abbots were deposed. Although the remainder served out their terms, no Englishman was appointed to the bench by the Conqueror. There were also substantial changes in the physical landscape of the Church, as a number of sees were moved from their ancient locations to urban centers and still others into existing monasteries. The eventual replacement of all English bishops with Continental churchmen, and the migration of a handful of sees to new locations, were doubtless traumatic enough, but the Normanization of the Anglo-Saxon Church also included the replacement of Old English as the vernacular tongue of the ruling ecclesiastical elite and the sporadic suppression of native liturgical and devotional traditions. Although the effects of the Conquest were felt unevenly across the kingdom's ecclesiastical communities, it was nevertheless the case that the English Church had become, by 1070, a colonial Church. Its rank and file members, by and large, could not understand their leaders, whose ways were often as foreign as their mother tongue.

Despite the trauma of these events, which was real enough, it would be a mistake to overemphasize the effects of the Conquest. The English Church and its traditions proved resilient in a variety of ways, and many of the developments for which the Normans were given credit in the twelfth century were either already underway in the eleventh or owed their inspiration to religious transformations beyond Normandy. Indeed, when the Conqueror's ducal Church, as well as his ecclesiastical decisions in England are taken into account, it is obvious that political considerations dominated his ecclesiastical policy wherever he ruled. Far from representing the piety of the reformed papacy, his was an old-style Church, carefully manipulated for political gain. In reference to William's handling of the English Church, Frank Barlow aptly noted that, “his religious policy was little more than the exercise of his power within a particular sphere.” Many have studied the impact of the Norman Conquest on English institutions, including the Church, and the details will not be rehearsed here.