d to make room for its famous
churchyard. Rahere, a minstrel at Henry's court, raised the Priory of St.
Bartholomew beside Smithfield. Alfune built St. Giles's at Cripplegate.
The old English Cnichtenagild surrendered their soke of Aldgate as a site
for the new priory of the Holy Trinity. The tale of this house paints
admirably the temper of the citizens at the time. Its founder, Prior
Norman, built church and cloister and bought books and vestments in so
liberal a fashion that no money remained to buy bread. The canons were at
their last gasp when the city-folk, looking into the refectory as they
passed round the cloister in their usual Sunday procession, saw the
tables laid but not a single loaf on them. "Here is a fine set out," said
the citizens; "but where is the bread to come from?" The women who were
present vowed each to bring a loaf every Sunday, and there was soon bread
enough and to spare for the priory and its priests.

[Sidenote: Thomas of London]

We see the strength of the new movement in the new class of ecclesiastics
whom it forced on to the stage. Men like Archbishop Theobald drew
whatever influence they wielded from a belief in their holiness of life
and unselfishness of aim. The paralysis of the Church ceased as the new
impulse bound prelacy and people together, and at the moment we have
reached its power was found strong enough to wrest England out of the
chaos of feudal misrule. In the early part of Stephen's reign his brother
Henry, the Bishop of Winchester, who had been appointed in 1139 Papal
Legate for the realm, had striven to supply the absence of any royal or
national authority by convening synods of bishops, and by asserting the
moral right of the Church to declare sovereigns unworthy of the throne.
The compact between king and people which became a part of constitutional
law in the Charter of Henry had gathered new force in the Charter of
Stephen, but its legitimate consequence in the responsibility of the
crown for the execution of the compact was first drawn out by these
ecclesiastical councils. From their alternate depositions of Stephen and
Matilda flowed the after depositions of Edward and Richard, and the
solemn act by which the succession was changed in the case of James.
Extravagant and unauthorized as their expression of it may appear, they
expressed the right of a nation to good government. Henry of Winchester
however, "half monk, half soldier," as he was called, possessed too
l