128 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S 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 Christen- dom, 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 which threatened to stand wholly out- side the law of the land; and the ecclesiastical pretensions of the time were perhaps well matched by the pretensions of the State.^ . . . In February 1166 he drew up his long-delayed scheme. His plans were rapidly completed; by the 16th of March the new system was at work. Such were the conditions under which appeared the famous > Assize of Clarendon. For the first time in English history ( a code of laws was issued by the sole authority of the king, without any appeal to the sanction of binding and immutable " custom." Indeed, in all Europe there was no instance of national legislation which could be compared with it, for it was not till a hundred years later that the first code of laws since the time of the Carolingian Capitularies was drawn up in France. Its very name bears witness to the impression it
- Here follows the account of the conflict with Becket and of the let-
ter's death. — Eds.
