renewed four
years after with success by Martin the nuncio, who brought from Rome
powers of suspending and excommunicating all clergymen that refused to
comply with his demands. The king, who relied on the pope for the
support of his tottering authority, never failed to countenance those
exactions.

Meanwhile, all the chief benefices of the kingdom were conferred on
Italians; great numbers of that nation were sent over at one time to
be provided for; non-residence and pluralities were carried to an
enormous height; Mansel, the king's chaplain, is computed to have held
at once seven hundred ecclesiastical livings; and the abuses became so
evident as to be palpable to the blindness of superstition itself.
The people, entering into associations, rose against the Italian
clergy; pillaged their barns; wasted their lands; insulted the persons
of such of them as they found in the kingdom [o]; and when the
justices made inquiry into the authors of this disorder, the guilt was
found to involve so many, and those of such high rank, that it passed
unpunished. At last, when Innocent IV., in 1245, called a general
council at Lyons, in order to excommunicate the Emperor Frederic, the
king and nobility sent over agents to complain before the council of
the rapacity of the Romish church. They represented, among many other
grievances, that the benefices of the Italian clergy in England had
been estimated, and were found to amount to sixty thousand marks [p] a
year, a sum which exceeded the annual revenue of the crown [q]. They
obtained only an evasive answer from the pope; but as mention had been
made before the council of the feudal subjection of England to the see
of Rome, the English agents, at whose head was Roger Bigod, Earl of
Norfolk, exclaimed against the pretension, and insisted that King John
had no right, without the consent of his barons, to subject the
kingdom to so ignominious a servitude [r]. The popes, indeed, afraid
of carrying matters too far against England, seem thenceforth to have
little insisted on that pretension.
[FN [o] Rymer, vol. i. p. 323. M. Paris, p. 255, 257. [p] Innocent's
bull in Rymer, vol. i. p. 471, says only fifty thousand marks a year.
[q] M. Paris, p. 451. The customs were part of Henry's revenue, and
amounted to six thousand pounds a year: they were at first small sums
paid by the merchants for the use of the king's warehouses, measures,
weights, &c. See Gilbert's History of the Exch. p.