Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/329

 civil suits than those which, touch testamentary or matrimonial matters. Edward II had to prohibit the employment of imperial notaries. In the spiritual matters proper, the kings seldom interfered; only where a political motive was suspected, or where a servant of the crown was attacked, or where the spiritual judge had clearly gone beyond his discretion. The Church history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is full of cautions and prohibitions, and of struggles between the officers who had thus to interfere with one another; and the definitions of the 'Articuli Cleri' under Edward II which prescribed the points on which prohibitions were to be granted, and the Statute of Præmunire under Edward III, which forbade the multiplication of appeals to Rome, did little to ameliorate relations. When however heresy became a matter of litigation, the two systems deliberately worked together; and, although there were many hitches, during the whole of the Lancastrian period there was more definite co-operation and less conflict. The common law was really becoming more a matter of scientific treatment, and the greatest judges were men who had had scientific education on both sides. Sometimes there was, as was natural, a little inconsistency and awkwardness; the bowsprit got mixed up with the rudder; as when Morton, at once archbishop and chancellor, allowed his judgment on a fraudulent executor to be modified by the reflexion that he would be 'damnée in hell.' But this may have been exceptional.

It must not however be supposed that the fault in this rivalry was altogether to be ascribed to the canonists. The English-trained lawyer was as infallible in that age as in this; and when we find him, and his brethren in the parliament, constantly hampering the legitimate work of the church, we see that there were two sides to the question; when in the fourteenth century the Commons petition that the clergy may not make in their convocation canons to bind the laity, it is rather a relief to find that the canons in question relate to tithe of underwood: but when in 1446 we find the clergy remonstrating that the professional lawyers 'pretended privilege, by what right,' they say, 'we know not, to interpret