Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/141

 ^. GREEN: HENRY II 127 begun, and there was much debatable ground which might be won by the most arrogant or the most skilful of the com- batants. Every brawl of a few noisy lads in the Oxford streets or at the gates of some cathedral or monastic school was enough to kindle the strife as to the jurisdiction of Church or State which shook mediaeval society to its foundation. The Church courts not only had jurisdiction over the whole clerical order, but exercised wide powers even over the laity. To them alone belonged the right to enforce spiritual penalties, to deal with cases of oaths, promises, anything in which a man's faith was pledged; to decide as to the property of intestates, to pronounce in every case of inherit- ance whether the heir was legitimate, to declare the law as to wills and marriage. Administering as they did an enlight- ened system of law, they profited by the new prosperity of the country, and the judicial and pecuniary disputes 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 Eng- land ; 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 salva- tion 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