es
which came to them had never been so abundant as now. Henry was keenly
alive to the fact that the archdeacons' courts now levied every year by
their fines more money than the whole revenue of the crown. Young
archdeacons were sent abroad to be taught the Roman law, and returned to
preside over the newly-established archdeacons' courts; clergy who sought
high office were bound to study before all things, even before theology,
the civil and canon law. The new rules, however, were as yet incomplete
and imperfectly understood in England; the Church courts were without the
power to put them in force; the procedure was hurried and irregular; the
judges were often ill-trained, and unfit to deal with the mass of legal
business which was suddenly thrown on them; the ecclesiastical authorities
themselves shrank from defiling the priesthood by contact with all this
legal and secular business, and kept the archdeacons in deacons' orders;
the more religious clergy questioned whether for an archdeacon salvation
were possible. In the eight years of Henry's rule one hundred murders had
been committed by clerks who had escaped all punishment save the light
sentences of fine and imprisonment inflicted by their own courts, and
Henry bitterly complained that a reader or an acolyte might slay a man,
however illustrious, and suffer nothing save the loss of his orders.

Since the beginning of Henry's reign, too, there had been an enormous
increase of appeals to Rome. Questions quite apart from faith or morals,
and that mostly concerned property, were referred for decision to a
foreign court. The great monasteries were exempted from episcopal control
and placed directly under the Pope; they adopted the customs and laws
which found favour at Rome; they upheld the system of appeals, in which
their wealth and influence gave them formidable advantages. The English
Church was no longer as in earlier times distinct from the rest of
Christendom, but was brought directly under Roman influence. The clergy
were more and more separated from their lay fellow citizens; their rights
and duties were determined on different principles; they were governed by
their own officers and judged by their own laws, and tried in their own
courts; they looked for their supreme tribunal of appeal not to the King's
Court, but to Rome; they became, in fact, practically freed from the
common law.

No king, and Henry least of all, could watch unmoved the first great
body