sy between clergy and laity become
that the bishops no longer sought civil aid but restricted themselves to
the purely spiritual punishments of penance and deprivation of orders.
Such penalties formed no effectual check upon crime, and while preserving
the Church courts the king aimed at the delivery of convicted offenders
to secular punishment. For the carrying out of these designs he sought an
agent in Thomas the Chancellor. Thomas had now been his minister for
eight years, and had fought bravely in the war against Toulouse at the
head of the seven hundred knights who formed his household. But the king
had other work for him than war. On Theobald's death he forced on the
monks of Canterbury his election as Archbishop. But from the moment of
his appointment in 1162 the dramatic temper of the new Primate flung its
whole energy into the part he set himself to play. At the first
intimation of Henry's purpose he pointed with a laugh to his gay court
attire: "You are choosing a fine dress," he said, "to figure at the head
of your Canterbury monks"; once monk and Archbishop he passed with a
fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism; and a visit to the Council
of Tours in 1163, where the highest doctrines of ecclesiastical authority
were sanctioned by Pope Alexander the Third, strengthened his purpose of
struggling for the privileges of the Church. His change of attitude
encouraged his old rivals at court to vex him with petty lawsuits, but no
breach had come with the king till Henry proposed that clerical convicts
should be punished by the civil power. Thomas refused; he would only
consent that a clerk, once degraded, should for after offences suffer
like a layman. Both parties appealed to the "customs" of the realm; and
it was to state these "customs" that a court was held in 1164 at
Clarendon near Salisbury.

[Sidenote: Legal Reforms]

The report presented by bishops and barons formed the Constitutions of
Clarendon, a code which in the bulk of its provisions simply re-enacted
the system of the Conqueror. Every election of bishop or abbot was to
take place before royal officers, in the king's chapel, and with the
king's assent. The prelate-elect was bound to do homage to the king for
his lands before consecration, and to hold his lands as a barony from the
king, subject to all feudal burthens of taxation and attendance in the
King's Court. No bishop might leave the realm without the royal
permission. No tenant in chief