Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/39

 1. MAITLAND: A PROLOGUE 25 of Reims. The false decretals are elaborate mosaics made up out of phrases from the bible, the fathers, genuine canons, genuine decretals, the West Goth's Roman law-book; but all these materials, wherever collected, are so arranged as to establish a few great principles : the grandeur and super- human origin of ecclesiastical power, the sacrosanctity of the persons and the property of bishops, and, though this is not so prominent, the supremacy of the bishop of Rome. Episcopal rights are to be maintained against the chore' piscopi, against the metropolitans, and against the secular power. Above all (and this is the burden of the song), no accusation can be brought against a bishop so long as he is despoiled of his see: Spoliatus episcopus ante omnia debet restittd. Closely connected with this fraud was another. Someone who called himself a deacon of the church of Mainz and gave his name as Benedict, added to the four books of capit- ularies, which Ansegis had published, three other books con- taining would-be, but false, capitularies, which had the same bent as the decretals concocted by the Pseudo-Isidore. These are not the only, but they are the most famous mam- festations of the lying spirit which had seized the Prankish clergy. The Isidorian forgeries were soon accepted at Rome The popes profited by documents which taught that ever since the apostolic age the bishops of Rome had been declar- ing, or even making, law for the universal church. On this rock or on this sand a lofty edifice was reared.^ " And now for the greater part of the Continent comes the time when ecclesiastical law is the only sort of law that is visibly growing. The stream of capitularies ceased to flow ; there was none to legislate; the Prankish monarchy was going to wreck and ruin ; feudalism was triumphant. Sacer- dotalism also was triumphant, and its victories were closely connected with those of feudalism. The clergy had long been striving to place themselves beyond the reach of the state's tribunals. The dramatic struggle between Henry II 1863. See also Tardif, op. cit. 133 S.; Conrat, op. cit, i. 299; Brunner, op. cit. i. 384. e. El
 * The Decretales Pseudo-Tsidorianae were edited by Hinschius in