The Constitutions of Clarendon

The test of the situation came when Henry undertook a new reform that touched the privileges of the church. William I had given the church separate ecclesiastical courts in which clerks alone could be tried. No matter if a clerk had been guilty of most grievous crimes, such as murder, robbery, seduction, attempts at poison, and the like, he could not be tried in the civil courts. Too often guilty clerks had gone free or suffered no heavier punishment than degradation or excommunication, the only penalties that the church could inflict. This abuse Henry determined to remedy by making clerks subject to the royal courts.' But Becket answered that ecclesiastics ought to be exempt from all temporal justice. His statement was based, not on old custom, but on the recent claims, that the church was everywhere making, of entire independence from the control of the state. Henry, enraged at

KNOCKER.

This knocker is on the sanctuary door on the north side of the nave Of the cathedral of Durham. A fugitive seeking sanctuary used this knocker in order to obtain admittance.

Becket's resistance, assembled the court at Clarendon and requested Becket to assent to a "recognition of some part of the customs, liberties, and dignities of his ancestors." Becket not knowing, because no one knew, exactly what these customs were, yielded for the sake of peace and promised to accept them. Then a commission was appointed to draw up a record of these customs. The report of this committee is now known as the Constitutions of Clarendon.

Becket was called upon to agree to the following: (1) that a clerk accused of a crime should first be summoned before a temporal court and there be charged with his guilt, that he should then be tried, convicted, and degraded in an ecclesiastical court, and thus having been unfrocked and become a layman should be brought back to the temporal court and be given a layman's punishment, mutilation or death; (2) that no one should leave the kingdom without the permission of the king or without taking oath not to do anything to the injury of the king or the kingdom; (3) that none of the king's tenants or ministers should be excommunicated or his lands placed under interdict without the consent of the king or his justiciar; (4) that an appeal in an ecclesiastical matter should be from an archdeacon's court to the bishop's court, then to the archbishop's court, and finally, not to the pope, but to the king; (5) that archbishops and bishops, who held land of the king, should be liable to all the obligations of a secular character thereby incurred and should sit in the king's court in all cases except such as involved mutilation or death; (6) that a consecrated church or cemetery, usually a sanctuary for a criminal, could not be used to protect goods forfeited to the king.

Nearly all these clauses simply defined the relations of church and state as they had been in the days of William the Conqueror. But the claims of the mediaeval church had changed in the interval since William's reign, and Becket, as archbishop, could not consent to a return to the old conditions. The quarrel between Henry and Becket was due to the fact that the former was standing for the customs of his ancestors, the latter for the new claims of the church.