erious prophecies passed from mouth to mouth that the king would never be seen in the island again, and even Theobald, before his death in 1161, had sent urgent entreaties for h

dangerous rebellion; but with these two exceptions every coming of the king was marked by the carrying out of some great administrative reform. In his half-compacted empire order was still only maintained by his actual presence and the sheer force of his personal authority, as he hurried from country to country to quell a rising in Gascony or a revolt in Galloway, to wage war in Wales

he early English Church, which had grown up along with the secular laws and had a distinctly national character. So long, indeed, as the canon law remained somewhat vague, and the Church courts incomplete, they could work peaceably side by side with the lay courts; but with the development of ecclesiastical law in the middle of the twelfth century, it was inevitable that difficulties should spring up. The boundaries of civil and

nly alive to the fact that the archdeacons' courts now levied every year by their fines more money than the whole revenue of the crown. Young archdeacons were sent abroad to be taught the Roman law, and returned to preside over the newly-established archdeacons' courts; clergy who sought high office were bound to study before all things, even before theology, the civil and canon law. The new rules, however, were as yet incomplete and imperfectly understood in England; the Church courts were without the power to put them in force; the procedure was hurried and irregular; the judges were often ill-trained, and unfit to deal with the mass of leg

customs and laws which found favour at Rome; they upheld the system of appeals, in which their wealth and influence gave them formidable advantages. The English Church was no longer as in earlier times distinct from the rest of Christendom, but was brought directly under Roman influence. The clergy were more and more separated from th

rper change of throwing off the chancellor to become the archbishop. With keen political sagacity he at once sought the moral support of the religious party who had so vehemently condemned his appointment. The gorgeous ostentation of his old life gave way to an equally elaborate scheme of saintliness. He threw away with tears his splendid dress to put on sackcloth and the black cloak of the monk. His table was still covered with gold and silver dishes and with costly meats, but the hall was now crowded with the poor and needy, and at his own side sat only the most learned and holy among the monks and clergy. Forty clerks "most learned in the law" formed his household. He visited the sick in the inf

archbishop approve. Henry's bitter anger was aroused when Thomas resigned the chancellorship, "not now wishing to be in the royal court, but desiring to have leisure for prayers, and to superintend the business of the Church." The king retorted by forcing Thomas to resign his archdeaconry with its rich fees; and at his landing in January 1163 he received the archbishop, who came to meet him, "with averted face." Thomas, on his part, added another grievance by refusing on ecclesiastical grounds to allow Henry to marry his brother to Stephen's daughter-in-law, the Countess of Warenne; and on the general question of the relations of Church and State, he hastened to define his views with sharp precision in an eloquent sermon preached before the king. "Henry observing it word by word

t to an arbitrary act of this kind. He made no objection to the payment of the tax, but he was determined to prevent the local revenues being seized in this way by the king. His action seems to have been wise and patriotic, and his triumph was complete. Henry was forced to abandon the scheme. Having awakened the anger of the king, Thomas next alienated the whole party of the barons by pressing his demands for the recovery of lands belonging to his see. Tunbridge, Rochester, now in the custody of the crown itself, Hythe, Saltwood, and a

in the Church Court, but to appease the king ordered him to be branded,-a punishment condemned by ecclesiastical law which considered all injury to the person as defiling the image of God. Such devices, however, were thrown away on Henry. When another clerk, Philip de Broc, who had been accused of manslaughter, was set free by the Church courts, the king's justiciar ordered him to be brought to a second trial before a lay judge. Philip refused to submit. The justiciar then charged him with contempt of court for his vehement and abusive language to the officer who summoned him, but the archbishop

he Church was torn asunder by schism; and the bishops frankly admitted a yet more pressing consideration: "For if we do not what the king wishes," they said, "flight will be cut off from us, and no man will seek after our souls; but if we consent to the king, we shall own the sanctuary of God in heredity, and shall sleep safely in the possession of our churches." On the other hand, the archbishop had no mind to resign without a contest all the results of the great tide of feeling which had swept the Church onward far past its old landmarks. For him there was no going back to a traditional past from which the Church had shaken itself free, and in which, though king and barons might see the freedom of the State, he saw the enslaving and degradation of the clergy. He vehemently asserted that the "customs" of the Church were of greater authority than any "customs" of the kingdom, that its canon law claimed obedience as against all traditional national law whatever; and with keen politi

the clerical order were a benefit in which the whole people had a share. If the king was determined to wage war on "privilege," clergy and people were equally resolute to defend "liberty." Moreover, in attacking the special jurisdiction of the Church, Henry had to encounter a force to which there is no parallel in our own time. An English king had doubtless less to fear from the Church than had any continental ruler. Abroad the bishop-stool, the abbey, the Church, were oases in the midst of perpetual war,-the only spots where peace and law and justice spoke in protest against the chaos of the world. But England was, in comparison with the rest of the western world, a country of peace and law. There the Church was less powerful against the State because the State had never handed over its duty of maintaining justice and law and right to the exclusive guardianship of the Church. None the less it was a formidable matter to rouse the hostility of a body

f the king's chapel, and had their whole training in the administration of the court; and they formed an official nobility who were charged, in common with the secular nobility, with the conduct of the general business of the realm. They were appointed to their places by the king for services done to him, and as instruments of his policy. Neither Pope nor people had any share in their election. Their estates were granted them by the same titles, and with the same obligations as those of feudal barons; the king could withhold their temporalities, sequestrate their lands, confiscate their personal goods, and burden them with heavy fines; they lay absolutely at his mercy without appeal. Every

throughout southern England, and to its bishop inevitably fell the leadership of this party against Canterbury, which was in the hands of a monastic chapter. The Bishop of Winchester, Henry of Blois, could well remember the struggle between Church and Crown under a far weaker king twenty six years before, when the bishops had wisely withdrawn from a contest where they had "seen swords unsheathed and knew it was no longer a joking matter, but a struggle of life and death," and with the prudence born of long political experience he was for moderate counsels. The Bishop of Chichester, Hilary, doubtless remembered the inconvenient part which Thomas as chancellor had played in his own trial a few years before, and might gladly recognize a poetic justice in seeing Thomas's old doctrines of the suprem

wn, so that no question might ever arise as to the laws which Thomas had sworn to observe; and "wise men" passed into the next room to write according to the king's will. They returned with a draft of sixteen articles, the famous "Constitutions of Clarendon." To these the king commanded that the Primate should set his seal; but Thomas, agitated by fear and anxiety, was no longer of the same mind. "By the omnipotent God," he cried, "while I live, I will never set my seal to it!" Whether he finally submitted it is impossible now to say. But he left the court with a last protest. A copy of the writing was torn down the middle, and one half, after the fashion of the "tallies" of the day, was given to Thomas in token of his promise, while the other was laid up in the royal treasury. "I take this," said the archbishop, "not consenting nor approving," and turning to the clergy: "By this we may know the malice of the king, and those things which we must beware of." He left the council and retired to Winchester, where in sackcloth and penance, shut out from the services of the Church, he condemned himself to wait in deepest humiliation till he should receive the Pope's absolution for his momentary betrayal of duty. For years to come a furious battle was to rage round the sixteen articles drawn up at Clarendon. According to Thomas, the Constitutions were a mere act of arbitrary violence, a cunning device of tyranny. He asserted that they were the sole deed of the justiciar De Lucy, an

from the mutual jealousy of Church and lay courts, and the difficulties thus thrown in the way of administering laws which were not disputed; rules were made for the securities to be taken from excommunicated persons; for the giving up to the king of forfeited goods of felons deposited in churches or churchyards; and forbidding the ordination of villeins without their lord's consent,-a provision which possibly was intended to prevent the withdrawal of an unlimited number of p

ment had been made in his court; that questions of advowsons or presentations to livings questions which at that time represented comparatively a vast amount of property-should be tried in the king's court; and that the king's judges should decide in matters of debt, even where the case included a question of perjury or broken faith, which was claimed as a matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Such laws as these were no doubt in Henry's mind simply part of his scheme for establishing a general order and one undivided authority in the realm. But they opened very much wider grounds of dispute between Church and State than the mere questio

et fears. All Europe was concerned in the dispute of king and archbishop. The Pope at Sens, the French king, the "eldest son of the Church," the princes of the House of Blois, as steadfast in their orthodoxy as in their hatred of the Angevin, the Emperor, ready to use any quarrel for his own purposes, were all eagerly watching every turn of the strife. In August Henry was startled by the news that Thomas himself had fled to seek the protection of the Pope at Sens. He was, however, recognized by sailors, and carried back to English shores. Henry immediately dealt his counter-blow. The archbishop was summoned in September to London to answer in a case which John, the marshal, an officer of the Exchequer, had withdrawn from the Archbishop's to the King's Court. Tho

nd of superstition to the forms of legal process. The archbishop asked leave to appeal to the Pope. "You shall first answer in my court for the injury done to John the marshal," said Henry. The next day, Thursday, this matter was decided. Bishops and barons alike, lacking somewhat of the king's daring, shrank at first from the responsibility of pronouncing judgment. "We are laymen," said the barons; "you are his fellow-priests and fellow-bishops, and it is for you to declare sentence." "Nay," answered the bishops, "this is not an ecclesiastical but a secular judgment, and we sit here not as bishops but as barons; if you heed our orders you should also take heed of his." The dispute was a critical one, leading as it did directly to questions about the jurisdiction of the Curia Regis over ecclesiastical persons, and the obligation asserted in the Constitutions of Clarendon, that bishops should sit with barons in the King's Court till it came to a question of blood. The kin

and on the side of Thomas. "If the authority of the king was to prevail," he argued, "what remains but that nothing shall henceforth be done according to law, but all things shall be disturbed for his pleasure-and the priesthood shall be as the people," he concluded, with a stirring of the churchman's temper. The Bishop of Exeter added another plea to induce Thomas to stand firm: "Surely it is better to put one head in peril than to set the whole Church in danger." Not so, thought the Bishop of Lincoln, "a simple man and of little discretion;" "for it is plain," he said, "that this man must yield up either the archbishopric or his life; but what should be the fruit of his archbishopric to him if his life should cease, I see not." The Bishop of Worcester, son of the famous Robert of Gloucester, and Henry's own cousin and playmate in old days took an eminently prudent course. "I will give no counsel," he said, "for if I say our charge of souls is to be given up at the king's threats, I should speak against my consci

Christian martyr, and of the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury, Aelfheah. Still arrayed in his pontifical robes, he set out for his last ride to the castle. Of the forty clerks "most learned in the law," who formed his household, only two ventured to follow him; but "an innumerable multitude" of people thronged round him as he passed bearing his cross in his right hand, and followed him to the castle doors with cries of lamentation, weeping and kneeling for his benediction, for it was spread abroad that he should that day be slain. The gates were quickly closed in the face of the tumultuous crowd, and Thomas p

harged by Rufus with treason, had asserted the privilege of a bishop to be tried in pontifical dress, and to be judged only by the canon law in an ecclesiastical court, and had claimed the right of appeal to Rome. But such doctrines were in those days new and somewhat doubtful, not supported in any degree by the Church and quite outside the sympathy of nobles and people, and Lanfranc had easily eluded the Bishop of Durham's claims. Anselm himself had accepted a number of points disputed now by Thomas. He frankly admitted the king's authority in appointing him to the see of Canterbury; he submitted to the jurisdiction of the King's Court; he made no claims to clerical privileges or special forms of trial. He had indeed given the first example of a saving clause in his oath to keep the customs of the kingdom; but the clause he used, "according to God," was radicall

ting shame!" With faces of abject terror they surrounded Thomas, and the Bishop of Winchester implored him to resign his see. "The same day and the same hour," he answered, "shall end my bishopric and my life." "Would to God," cried Hilary, "that thou wert and shouldst remain only Thomas without any other dignity whatever!" But Thomas refused all compromise; he had not been summoned to answer in this cause; he had already suffered against law for men of Kent and of the sea-border charged with the defence of the coast might be fined only one-third as much as the inland men; at hi

us remodelled formally condemned the archbishop as a traitor, and the earls of Leicester and of Cornwall were sent to pronounce judgment. But the sentence was never spoken. Thomas sprang up, cross in hand, and passionately forbade Leicester to speak. "How can you refuse to obey," said Leicester, "seeing you are the king's man, and hold your possessions as a fief from him?" "God forbid!" said Thomas; "I hold nothing whatever of him in fief, for whatever the Church holds it holds in perpetual liberty, not in subjection to any earthly sovereignty whatever.... I am your father, you princes of the palace, lay powers, secular persons; as gold is better than lead, so is the spiritual better than the lay power.... By my authority I forbid you to pronounce the sentence." As the nobles retired the archbishop raised his cross: "I also withdraw," he said, "for the hour is past." Cries of "Traitor!" followed him down the hall. Knights and barons rushed

nce and repress a lawless baronage. But now he could no longer look for the aid of the Church; all dream of orderly legislation seemed over. Amid all his violence, however, the king's sincere attempt to maintain the outward authority of law made of the Council of Northampton a great event in our constitutional history. It showed that the rule of pure despotism was over. A new step was taken too in the political education of the nation. Thrown back on the support of his own officials and of the baronage, Henry used the nob