Thomas was also unsuccessful in a claim that he made to twelve estates anciently belonging to the bishopric of Worcester and appropriated by Aldred to the see of York. Wulstan [q. v.], bishop of Worcester, refused to give them up, and Thomas, who before the boundary of his province was decided claimed Wulstan as his suffragan, accused him of insubordination, and later joined Lanfranc in desiring his deprivation. The estates were adjudged to the see of Worcester in a national assembly presided over by the king. Thomas was afterwards on friendly terms with Wulstan, and commissioned him to discharge episcopal functions in parts of his province into which he could not go, because they were still unsubdued, and because he could not speak English (T. Stubbs, ii. 362; Flor. Wig. an. 1070; Gesta Pontificum, p. 285). He was present at the council of London held by Lanfranc in 1075, and it was there settled that the place in council of the archbishop of York was on the right of the archbishop of Canterbury (ib. p. 68). In that year a Danish fleet sailed up the Humber, and the invaders did damage to his cathedral church, St. Peter's, which he was then raising from its ruined state, and took away much plunder (Anglo-Saxon Chron. sub an.). After the settlement of their dispute he was very friendly with Lanfranc, who, at his request, commissioned two of his suffragans to assist Thomas in consecrating Ralph, bishop of Orkney, at York on 5 March 1077; and, when writing on that matter, Thomas assured Lanfranc that a suggestion made by Remigius [q. v.], bishop of Dorchester, that he would again put forward a claim to the obedience of the bishops of Dorchester and Worcester, was unfounded (Lanfranc, i. 34–6). He also received a profession of obedience from Fothad or Foderoch (d. 1093), bishop of St. Andrews, who was sent to him by Malcolm III [q. v.] and his queen Margaret (d. 1093) [q. v.], and employed him as his commissary to dedicate some churches (Hugh the Chantor, T. Stubbs, ap. Historians of York, ii. 127, 363). When the Conqueror was in the Isle of Wight in 1086, both the archbishops being with him, he was shown a charter that had been forged by the monks of Canterbury and widely distributed, to the effect that the archbishop of York was bound to make profession to Canterbury with an oath, which had been remitted by Lanfranc without prejudice to his successors. The king is said to have been angry, and to have promised to do justice to Thomas on his return from his expedition, but died in the course of it (Hugh, u.s. 101–2). Thomas refused to give advice to his suffragan William of St. Calais, bishop of Durham [see William, d. 1096] when summoned before Rufus to answer to a charge of treason, and took part in the trial of the bishop in the king's court at Salisbury in November 1088 (Sym. Dunelm. Opera, i. 175, 179, 183). He attended the funeral of Lanfranc at Canterbury in 1089, and during the vacancy of the see consecrated three bishops to dioceses in the southern province, they making profession to the future archbishop of Canterbury. In 1092, when Remigius [q. v.] had finished his church at Lincoln, Thomas declared that it was in his province, not as being in the old diocese of Dorchester, but because Lincoln and a great part of Lindesey anciently pertained to the province of York, and had unjustly been taken away, together with Stow, Louth, and Newark, formerly the property of his church; and he therefore refused to dedicate the church which was to be the head of a diocese subject to Canterbury. William Rufus, however, ordered the bishops of the realm to dedicate it, and they assembled for the purpose, but the death of Remigius caused the ceremony to be put off (Flor. Wig. sub an.; Gir. Cambr. vii. 19, 194). A letter from Urban II, who became pope in 1088, to Thomas, is given by a York historian; in it the pope blames Thomas for having made profession to Lanfranc, and orders him to answer for his conduct; it presents some difficulty, but cannot be rejected (Hugh, u.s. pp. 105, 135).
On 4 Dec. 1093 Thomas and other bishops met at Canterbury to consecrate Anselm [q. v.] to that see, and before the rite began Bishop Walkelin, acting for the bishop of London, began to read out the instrument of election. When he came to the words ‘the church of Canterbury, the metropolitan church of all Britain,’ Thomas interrupted him; for though, as he said, he allowed the primacy of Canterbury, he could not admit that it was the metropolitan see of all Britain, as that would mean that the church of York was not metropolitan. The justice of his remonstrance was acknowledged, the words of the instrument were changed to ‘the primatial church of all Britain,’ and Thomas officiated at the consecration (Eadmer, Historia Novorum, col. 373). The York historian, however, states that Thomas objected to the title of primate of all Britain given in the instrument; that he declared that as there were two metropolitans one could not be primate except over the other; that he went back to the vestry and began to disrobe; that Anselm and Walkelin humbly begged him to come back; that the word ‘primate’
