peers" of whom the despot spoke so scornfully; throughout the whole period the House of Lords was full of them. But Napoleon's vision was bounded by the present. The haughty oligarchy who two centuries later were to play the part of guardian to the English monarchy and to fashion the cause of political liberty into an instrument fitted to their own ends, were the direct descendants of these humble dependents of the Crown. So great is the virtue of time and the hereditary principle !

A no less radical change was brought about in the position of the higher clergy. Immediately after the conquest William had elaborated a system of ecclesiastical jurisdiction distinct from the jurisdiction of the temporal courts. To the clergy were given courts of their own which took cognizance of the crimes and misdemeanours committed by members of their body, and the result of this immunity was to form them into an autonomous and distinct society. All clerical persons met on the summons of their archbishops in the Convocations of Canterbury and York, where they framed statutes for the regulation of their order, and from an early period granted by a separate vote the taxes affecting spiritualities (tithes and oblations). The Church was not merely independent; she had a voice in the affairs of the laity, her chiefs being members of the Great Council. Canon law was developed with astute comprehensiveness; all matters involving a religious element, wills, marriages, and finally all informal contracts fell within the province of the spiritual courts. As a natural result wealth followed influence, and it was

1

generally computed in the middle ages 1 that the clergy owned a third part of all the lands in the kingdom. The congregations, particularly the Cistercians, possessed revenues which might vie with the revenues of a State. The Church, too, profited from bounties which knew no limit, and it was her subtle genius and her example combined which first suggested to the lawyers of the day a method of attacking the feudal land system. The Papacy was naturally tempted to lay its grasp on that redoubtable organization and those immense resources. In no other country have the pretensions of Rome shown themselves more exorbitant, her greed more insatiable, her interference more rash. On two occasions, under William I. and under John,2 circumstances lent a colour to her claim to treat the English kingdom as a fief of the Holy See. We find her levying direct contributions from the clergy, sometimes even from the laity, skilfully multiplying appeals to the curia, appropriating the right of nomination to a vast number of benefices and bestowing them upon Italians, creatures of her own.

The same words would describe pretty accurately the position of the Church in other countries. The point to be remarked in the case of England is the peculiarly resolute and successful spirit of resistance manifested by the laity. We should err however in regarding this spirit as simple in its nature and operation; it supplied an outlet to that national feeling, the deeply-seated

1 Notably in 1380.

2 Stubbs, i., ch. xii. The tribute imposed upon John was, as a matter of fact, paid as late as 1333.

causes and the peculiar vigour of which I have already described; this feeling was present and potent everywhere, it lent to everything its form or its substance, and it could not fail to blend its own hostility to foreign. interference with the hostility of the civil power to the Papacy and of the secular to the ecclesiastical authority.1 Various circumstances added to the strength of this feeling and assisted it in the struggle. The great ecclesiastical dignitaries, as we have seen, belonged to the same class and sometimes to the same families as the great lay vassals: they made common cause with the latter and took a foremost place in the struggle at the period of the great charter. They, like the lay barons, felt the pressure of that species of external conscience which united all Englishmen in hatred of oppression and in mistrust of the foreigner. All, or nearly all, of them acted rather as statesmen than as heads of a separate body; rather as Englishmen than as princes of the Roman court. The House of Lords, where they preponderated greatly over the lay peers, may perhaps have shown less complacency than did the Lower House towards attacks directed against the Church, but they

1 The prohibition of gifts of land to religious houses appears as early as 1217 in the great charter. But it is at this time nothing more than a precaution designed to preserve the feudal basis of military organization. The sequestration of the Papacy by Philip the Fair seems to mark the beginning of an intense feeling of hostility on the part of the English to the See of St. Peter. It is clear that their national pride, ever watchful and on the alert, saw fresh cause to suspect and mistrust a power which had become a tool in the hands of a mighty neighbouring State. Green, i. bk. iv., ch. 2, 149, &c.

were not less ready to join in passing laws designed for the defence of civil society. A species of pre-anglicanism seems to have pervaded all the higher clergy, and not less beneficial was the fact that the lower clergy did not sit in the House of Commons; voluntarily or by the order of their chiefs they had withdrawn from it, and deliberated by themselves in their Convocations which were, both by nature and in form, purely ecclesiastical assemblies. Deceived by the strength of their position in the Upper House and in the Great Council, the prelates looked upon their own presence there as all-sufficient, and considered it wise to prohibit their clergy from appearing in the Lower House, where, being fewer in number, they might be out-voted by the laity. Thus the prelates persistently declined all right of representation in the House of Commons and established the custom of disposing in Convocation of all matters which concerned the Church. They felt that by so doing they were better able to marshal their forces, and in the interests of the whole body of which they were the heads to force their own terms upon the king. It is impossible to over-estimate the consequences of their mistake. Neither the name of the Church, nor her authority, neither the influence of her enlightenment, nor the resources of her ingenuity, were present as active forces in the assembly which was destined to become in a greater and greater degree the embodiment of the national spirit. The prelates allowed this spirit to gain strength and boldness, to struggle and prevail, while at each stage of its development the clergy were felt to be ignorant of the aspirations of the people and indifferent

to their efforts. The Church ended by counting for nothing in the hopes and aims of a nation which had remained for the rest deeply religious; or rather the nation had grown accustomed to see in her only the abuses from which she profited, the vast privileges which it was so natural to grudge her, her complicity or, at least, her common interest with Rome. This explains the continuously progressive movement, first of resistance to the Church, then of active hostility to her, which appeared in Parliament at an early date and continued down to the sixteenth century. The great revolution which then took place was only the final downfall of an edifice the walls of which had long been battered and undermined.1 That catastrophe had been announced, and the way for it prepared, by innumerable ordinances and statutes aimed, some against mortmain, some against the encroachments of the spiritual tribunals, others against appeals to the Roman curia or against the interference of the Pope in the nomination of bishops. Wicliff and the Lollards,2 in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had stirred up popular opinion against the higher clergy, the movement thus created was in the first instance encouraged by the Government, and was checked but not crushed by the persecution which followed. The

1 See Stubbs on the reigns of Edward II., Edward III. and Richard II. The whole fifteenth century abounds in complaints of, and in measures of resistance to, the influence of the Roman court and the clergy. In 1341 the seals are for the first time entrusted to a layman. In 1371 Parliament demands the appointment of laymen as ministers.

2 The De Dominio Divino dates at latest from 1368. Green, i. 447.