returned the next year. His father having died, he consulted with Lanfranc as to whether to return to his estates and employ their income in providing alms or to renounce them, becoming a hermit or a monk at Bec or Cluny. Professing to fear his own bias, Lanfranc sent him to Maurilius, the archbishop of Rouen, who convinced him to enter the abbey as a novice at the age of 27. Probably in his first year, he wrote his first work on philosophy, a treatment of Latin paradoxes called the Grammarian. Over the next decade, the Rule of Saint Benedict reshaped his thought. Abbot of Bec Early years Three years later, in 1063, Duke William II summoned Lanfranc to serve as the abbot of his new abbey of St Stephen at Caen and the monks of Bec—with some dissenters at first on account of his youth—elected Anselm prior. A notable opponent was a young monk named Osborne. Anselm overcame his hostility first by praising, indulging, and privileging him in all things despite his hostility and then, when his affection and trust were gained, gradually withdrawing all preference until he upheld the strictest obedience. Along similar lines, he remonstrated with a neighboring abbot who complained that his charges were incorrigible despite being beaten "night and day". After fifteen years, in 1078, Anselm was unanimously elected as Bec's abbot following the death of its founder, the warrior-monk Herluin. He was consecrated by the Bishop of Évreux on 22 February 1079. Under Anselm's direction, Bec became the foremost seat of learning in Europe, attracting students from France, Italy, and elsewhere. During this time, he wrote the Monologion and Proslogion. He then composed a series of dialogues on the nature of truth, free will, and the fall of Satan. When the nominalist Roscelin attempted to appeal to the authority of Lanfranc and Anselm at his trial for the heresy of tritheism at Soissons in 1092, Anselm composed the first draft of De Fide Trinitatis as a rebuttal and as a defence of Trinitarianism and universals. The fame of the monastery grew not only from his intellectual achievements, however, but also from his good example and his loving, kindly method of discipline—particularly with the younger monks—and from his spirited defence of the abbey's independence from lay and archiepiscopal control, protecting it from the influence of both the new Archbishop of Rouen and the Earl of