Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/315

 get a bad character for learning the Italian art of poisoning; some are killed in frays with the natives; some remain abroad and become professors; all more or less illustrate the scholastic question which John of Salisbury propounds, Is it possible for an archdeacon to be saved? There are some few exceptions, but they seem to be generally of the men who stuck to theology and went for their education no further than Paris. The scrapes of the archdeacons however I have spoken of before; they are a really amusing feature of the epistolary correspondence of the time. I pass on to something more important.

Great as the advantages might be of an improved code of laws and system of procedure, neither the canon law nor the civil law was accepted here; they were rejected not only by the stubborn obscurantism of Stephen, but by the bright and sagacious intellect of Henry II. Now, considering the close political connexion between Theobald and the Plantagenet party, it is not at all impossible that Henry II may have been among the pupils of Vacarius: certainly he was more of a lawyer than mere empirical education could make him, and, as certainly, he was awake to the difficulties to which too ready acceptance of the reformed jurisprudence would expose him. How great a lawyer he was I need not tell you; how directly his difficulties were owing to the new doctrines of the canon lawyers we know from the history of Becket. I will only mention two points that illustrate his permanent relation to the subject: first, his Assize of Darrein Presentment removed all questions of advowsons and presentations from the ecclesiastical courts where they were the source of constant appeals to Rome; and secondly, by the Constitutions of Clarendon he did his best to limit the powers of the ecclesiastical lawyers in criminal matters and in all points touching secular interests. Against this must be set the fact that to his days must be fixed the final sliding of testamentary jurisdiction into the hands of the bishops, which was by the legislation of the next century permanently left there, in a way which, however accordant with the policy of the papacy, was an exception to the rule of the rest of Christendom. Henry,