Principles of western civilisation

wir THE GREAT ANTINOMY: FIRST STAGE 277

under Henry I. had, in a hundred years, grown to such an extent that the king’s jurisdiction over ecclesiastics had become almost nominal in criminal matters. The significant words of this Bull mark the limits to which the claim of the spiritual authority now extended.

The tendency which accompanied these claims throughout Europe went much further, it has to be noted, than the mere emancipation of the spiritual authorities from civil jurisdiction. The aim underlying it worked steadily in the direction of bringing the whole civil jurisdiction within the direct control of the Church. With the gradual growth of the canon law, founded on the rescripts of popes and the decrees of councils, there arose throughout Europe a new legal code and a new class of legal practitioners. In the canon law, as Hallam points Out, “the superiority of ecclesiastical to temporal power, or at least the absolute independence of the former, may be considered as a sort of key-note which regulates every passage.”? This superiority, moreover, existed not simply in theory. Throughout the temporal governments of Christendom most effective measures were taken by the spiritual authority to gradually extend its control to general causes, to the temporal judges, and at length to all civil suits. The conditions through which this end was achieved often lay ready at hand. Large

* The brief but significant words with which cap. iii. of the Constitutions of Clarendon concludes—“ Et si clericus convictus vel confessus fuerit, non debet de cetero eum ecclesia tueri” (Stubb’s Select Charters)\—referred, in practice, toa condition of affairs in which the ecclesiastical tribunals had not

only encroached on the secular, but in which generally they had begun to obtain a real ascendency.

2

* View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, by Henry Hallam, chap. vii.