acy
which began with its extortions in the reign of Henry the Third. The hold
of Rome on the loyalty of England was sensibly weakening. Their transfer
from the Eternal City to Avignon robbed the Popes of half the awe which
they had inspired among Englishmen. Not only did it bring them nearer and
more into the light of common day, but it dwarfed them into mere agents of
French policy. The old bitterness at their exactions was revived by the
greed to which they were driven through their costly efforts to impose a
French and Papal Emperor on Germany as well as to secure themselves in
their new capital on the Rhone. The mighty building, half fortress, half
palace, which still awes the traveller at Avignon has played its part in
our history. Its erection was to the rise of Lollardry what the erection of
St. Peter's was to the rise of Lutheranism. Its massive walls, its stately
chapel, its chambers glowing with the frescoes of Simone Memmi, the garden
which covered its roof with a strange verdure, called year by year for
fresh supplies of gold; and for this as for the wider and costlier schemes
of Papal policy gold could be got only by pressing harder and harder on the
national churches the worst claims of the Papal court, by demands of
first-fruits and annates from rectory and bishoprick, by pretensions to the
right of bestowing all benefices which were in ecclesiastical patronage and
by the sale of these presentations, by the direct taxation of the clergy,
by the intrusion of foreign priests into English livings, by opening a mart
for the disposal of pardons, dispensations, and indulgences, and by
encouraging appeals from every ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the Papal
court. No grievance was more bitterly felt than this grievance of appeals.
Cases of the most trifling importance were called for decision out of the
realm to a tribunal whose delays were proverbial and whose fees were
enormous. The envoy of an Oxford College which sought only a formal licence
to turn a vicarage into a rectory had not only to bear the expense and toil
of a journey which then occupied some eighteen days but was kept dangling
at Avignon for three-and-twenty weeks. Humiliating and vexatious however as
these appeals were, they were but one among the means of extortion which
the Papal court multiplied as its needs grew greater. The protest of a
later Parliament, exaggerated as its statements no doubt are, shows the
extent of the national irritation, if