families of Normandy, the knightly lust of battle and conquest was most intimately blended with knightly devotion to the Church and the Pope. In point of fact, from the moment of the conquest, the bond between Rome and the English Church was drawn incomparably closer than it had ever been under the Saxon dynasty.

The clergy, partly of Norman-French, partly of pure Roman descent, to whom the English sees were now transferred, could have no national sympathies with Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Strangers, they passed into the midst of a strange church. It was natural that they should take up the position of abstract ecclesiastical right. Recall the instance of Lanfranc, a born Italian, who, in 1070, four years after the battle of Hastings, from being Prior of Bec, was promoted to be Archbishop of Canterbury. At the same date a Norman became Archbishop of York. As a general rule, the highest dignities of the English Church fell to Normans, and these priests of the Continent were all supporters of the new hierarchical movement, which began in the middle of the same century-of those ideas touching the supremacy of the Pope above the Church, and of the Church above the State, of which Hildebrand himself had been the deliberate and most emphatic champion. William the Conqueror, indeed, was not the man to suffer in silence any encroachments of the Pope upon the rights of his crown, to say nothing of the pretensions of any ecclesiastical dignitary in his own kingdom. A serious discord, which took place between the crown and the Primate, now Anselm of Canterbury, arising out of the investiture controversy, was only composed by the prudent concessions of Paschal II. to Henry I. in 1106.

All the more formidable was the conflict between the

royal and ecclesiastical powers under Henry II., exactly a hundred years after the conquest The quarrel in the main concerned the limits of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions-the right of exemption, e.g., from the jurisdiction of the municipal courts, which was claimed for the clergy by the Archbishop Thomas à Becket; and it may suffice to remind the reader in passing how in the end the Archbishop was assassinated (1170) by several knights, not without the indirect complicity of the king, and how, in consequence of that evil deed, Henry had to bow himself down in most humiliating penance (12th July 1174) at the grave of the now canonised champion of the Church's rights and liberties—a penance far more ignominious even than that of Canossa. The hierarchy obtained a great victory, as indeed had been in prospect for it ever since the Norman Conquest.

And yet this was not the culminating point to which the power of the Church attained in England. It did not reach that till forty years later. Innocent III. accomplished what Gregory VII. had striven for in the Conqueror's day in vain. King John, son of Henry II., finding himself in the greatest dangers, both from without and within the realm, had had recourse to a desperate step. On the 15th of May 1213, he had surrendered his kingdom, in favour of the apostles Peter and Paul and the Church of Rome, into the hands of Innocent III. and his successors. He received it, indeed, immediately back again from the Pope in fief, but not before taking for himself and his successors in all due form, the oath of fealty to the Pope as his liege lord, and binding himself to pay an annual tribute of 1000 marks sterling, in addition to the usual Peter's pence. Thereby England became literally a portion

of the Church-State, the king a vassal of the Pope, and the Pope liege lord and sovereign of England. England entered into and became a member of the Papal state system, which already included Portugal, Arragon, the kingdom of Sicily Hungary, Bulgaria, and other States-a relation to the Papacy which was turned to practical account to the utmost of the Church's power, by the levying of imposts from the kingdom, as well as by the accumulation of English church offices and dignities in the hands of Italians.

But from the moment when King John made over to the Papal See a feudal supremacy in England, the moral influence of the Papacy in the country began to stoop towards its overthrow. The English nobility were the first to feel the humiliation most deeply, and complained indignantly to the king that he had brought what he had found a free kingdom into bondage. Within two years the condition of things for a considerable time was such that the revolted barons held the chief power of the State in their hands. And then it was that Magna Charta, the fundamental charter of the nation's liberties, was negotiated between John and his subjects (15th June 1215). this document, the importance of which was even then universally felt, not a word was said of the liege-lordship of the Pope, although only two years had passed since this relation had been entered into, and no doubt this omission was intentional on the part of the barons.

In

Still the whole movement which had been called forth i ever-growing force against the despotic rule of the distrusted Prince, was also aimed, in the second instance, against Rome. The King himself, in a letter to Innocent III. (13th September 1215), assures him that the arls an barons of the kingdom publicly alleged as the chief cause

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of their revolt, his own act of submission to the Pope; and the Pope, on his side, considered the insurrection as directed in part against himself. An important reaction in the spirit of the Anglican Church, and in its attitude towards the Roman See, could not fail to be produced by the fact, that in that celebrated state-treaty there was a guarantee given for all the liberties and rights of the national church, as well as for all those of all other classes and corporations in the kingdom. While in the first instance, the great nobles and hierarchy, the lower nobility and the municipalities, all learned to feel their oneness as a nation, and to be sensible of their interests in common, there was no less a development in the ecclesiastical body of a national spirit. The spirit of insular independence began to make itself felt also in the religious sphere.

It had a powerful influence in the same religious direction, that from the beginning of the 13th century the Saxon element of the nation was again steadily coming to the front, and pressing the Norman element more and more into the background. Already, in 1204, Normandy had fallen to the crown of France. This loss had naturally the effect of first diminishing the immigration from Normandy, and then, in time, of stopping it altogether. On the other hand, the families which had previously immigrated-to say nothing of the decimation which they had suffered in consequence of the political movements under King John and his successor, Henry III.—had in process of time drawn closer in many ways to the Saxon population. The arbitrary oppression which the nobles suffered at the hand of the kings brought up the memory of the earlier rights and privileges of the nobility under the Saxon kings. The barons began to claim the like for themselves, and appealed to them in support of

their claim in their struggle with King John. The nobles no longer felt themselves to be Normans, but Englishmen; and all the more so, the more clearly men became conscious how much in questions of freedom and popular right was owing to the support of the lower nobility, and even to the municipalities, especially to the citizens of London.

This consolidation of the nation, in which the Saxon population constituted the kernel, could not remain without influence upon the self-consciousness and the hereditary independent genius of the Anglican Church. A symptom of this appeared in the secret combination of noblemen and priests, which, in 1231, addressed threatening letters to the capitular bodies and the abbacies, demanding of them to refuse payment to the agents of Rome of all imposts in money and kind. Not only so; but things, in fact, went so far that a Romish cleric, who was in possession of an English prelacy, was captured by the conspirators and not set at liberty again till five weeks after the loss of all his goods, while in country districts the full corn lofts of Roman parish priests were plundered and emptied. In 1240 the cardinal legate Otho himself was menaced most seriously by an insurrection of students in Oxford. Such tumultuous proceedings were of course not suffered by the government. But neither were there wanting lawful measures directed against the Roman usurpations. The nobles, in a letter to Gregory IX., put in a protest in support of their violated rights of church patronage; and even bishops and prelates submitted complaints, sometimes to the papal legates, and sometimes to the Pope himself.