ere 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;[*] 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.

* Rymer, vol. i. p. 323. M. Paris, p. 255, 257.

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[*] a year, a sum which exceeded
the annual revenue of the crown itself.[**] 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.[***] The popes, indeed, afraid of carrying
matters too far against England, seem thenceforth to have little
insisted on that pretension.

This check, received at the council of Lyons, was not able to stop the
court of Rome in its rapacity: Innocent exacted the revenues of all
vacant benefices, the twentieth of all ecclesiastical revenues without
exception; the third of such as were exceeded a hundred marks a year;
the half of such as were possessed by non-residents.[****] He claimed
the goods of all intestate clergymen;[*****] he pretended a title to
inherit all money gotten by usury: he levied benevolences upon the
people; and when the king, contrary to his usual practice, prohibited
these exactions, he threatened to pronounce against him the same
censures which he had emitted against the emperor Frederic.[******]

* Innocent's bull in Rymer, vol. i. p. 471, says only fi