out formidable lordships for themselves in northern France, barely impeded by the intermittent opposition of kings; one, William of Normandy, by his conquest of England created the great Anglo-Norman dominion which overshadowed each of the northern French lordships, that of the king included. During this period the Capetians were able to add very little land to that under their control. Their greatest acquisition, the duchy of Burgundy, had to be ceded to Henry I's brother to buy off his bid for the crown; against loss on this scale the additions of the Gâtinais and Bourges to the crown lands in the reign of Philip was small compensation, though they did represent territories which could be held securely, which may not have been the case with Burgundy. Intermittent crises in each of the principalities allowed the kings to make sporadic interventions in their affairs, as when Henry I helped Duke William defeat Norman rebels in 1047, and from time to time Philip sought to balance Blois-Chartres or Anjou against Normandy, but although these interventions helped to preserve the royal right to intervene, and the subordinate status of the princes, they had little further effect. Philip was at least spared one indignity. The crown had preserved its right to invest over approximately a third of the French bishoprics, but he did not follow Henry IV's example in risking a full-scale conflict with the papacy to retain the right or to protect bishops from the investigations and castigations of Hugh of Lyons, Gregory VII's formidably principled legate in France. The choice was sensible for the lands and political power of many bishops had passed to the counts and viscounts of their cathedral cities. In the event the French crown gained more than it lost from the Gregorian Reform because the new insistence upon the right of cathedral chapters to elect their bishops made it more difficult, and perhaps less attractive, for the greatest families to provide for their relatives in this way. As a result an increasing proportion of French bishops after 1100 came not from the grandest families but from smaller noble families, more likely by reason of their relative smallness to be rivals of other local families, also with their relatives or associates in the chapter, and therefore in need of a figure to which they might look if

-157-