government, running chanceries and exchequers and keeping accounts and records of every kind. The last point, in one respect, is the most important of all: the Church had the literate manpower and the techniques to produce more sophisticated forms of government than any available to the secular world. In the Dark Ages these had been placed at the disposal of the barbarian tribal states: the Church, for instance, gave them written legal codes. But all the time the Church retained its old traditions of separate canonical legislation, dating back to the fourth century. The papacy had the oldest legal and administrative machine in Western Europe. The essence of the Carolingian renaissance, and of the Ottonian Empire which followed it, had been the identity of aim of Church and State, expressed in legal codes, and conciliar legislation, which dealt with both. Within this system the Church had always enjoyed a privileged position. Indeed, the laws had first been put in writing to provide specifically for the protection of the clerks and their property. In England, for instance, clerks had never been thrown completely on the tender mercies of the secular courts. Though every kind of charge could be brought against them in the ordinary courts, they were always judged by a bishop. Bishops often presided in the shire-courts; not until after the Norman Conquest were bishops and archdeacons forbidden to hear cases in the (lower) hundred courts. Moreover, royal legislation made ecclesiastical offences into secular offences; and canon law, as well as secular law, was admitted in the shire courts. Thus in Anglo-Saxon England the clergy were already, in a legal sense, a privileged class; the Same was true, with variations, elsewhere in Europe. This system of privilege, however, was still under royal, that is secular, control. The effect of the mid-eleventh-century church reforms, and of the Gregorian revolution which followed, was to drive a wedge into the joint legal system, and split it into two distinct streams of law. In the 1050s, the papal administration underwent a formidable expansion. A primitive Parkinson’s Law began to operate. More clerks were available to do the Pope’s bidding: work, therefore, expanded to occupy the time available. More clerics were learned in canon law: compilations of canon were made, therefore, and sent all over the Christian world: they were used locally, and appeals made to Rome; and can law was added to by an increased use of clerical legislative machinery. As can law expanded, and became more subtle and sophisticated, and as it evolved into a uniform international system, with the papacy as its supreme court of appeal, it was bound to diverge more and more from the national secular system. Different systems meant different courts; and if clerical courts tried ecclesiastical offences, should they not deal with clerics who committed any offence whatever? The clerical affirmative was delivered with all the more conviction in that canon law was, in their eyes, Clearly a superior system; it went back to Roman times, was, indeed, based on Roman principles of jurisprudence. Here the cultural snobbery came in again. . One reason why Gregory VII treated the Donation of Constantine with reserve was that it was incorporated in a secular document, and it was a principle of the canonist reformers that the Church could not entertain any legal proposition that was based on secular documentation alone: there must be confirmation in clerical archives. There was, also, a sense of exhilaration among the clerical revolutionaries. They were bringing mankind out of the dark past, into a brave new world of administrative efficiency. Away with government by illiterates and barbarous folk-laws! This was a view shared by many, especially, of course, clerics. The growth of an efficient papal court and chancery not only made the exercise of papal-clerical authority easier, it also attracted litigants and business. From the late eleventh century, every index of papal and central church activity began to show a sharp increase. 'Big' government and papal claims went hand in hand: the demand for power expanded pari passu with the administrative capacity to exercise it. In England, for instance, there had been no legislative councils until 1070 (except one in 786); in the period 1070-1312 there were between twenty and thirty. The West had played little part in the early general councils; then, between 1123-1311 there were seven. Papal correspondence increased accordingly (making allowance for a higher survival rate the later the period), from an average of one a year under Benedict IX, 1033-46, to 49