popes being obliged to write seventy letters. Innocent Ill, exasperated, wrote: ‘| blush to hear of this mouldy business.’ But when had the law not generated mould? St Bernard's cobwebs continued to spread. For, when he asked what fruit there was in legalism, the answer, of course, was money and power. A successful court - and the papal court was the outstanding legal success of the Middle Ages - generated income, and the need of great and small to solicit its verdicts. The Pope's legal relations with a king, a duke or an archbishop, might involve a dozen or more cases going on at one time, some momentous, many trivial, all of which had to be weighed by both sides in considering total policy. Much of the Pope's practical ability to get his way sprang from the power of his court to deliver. So it was impossible for the Pope to avoid the details. And to think chiefly in legal, was to think chiefly in secular, terms. The popes became progressively more entangled in legal-diplomatic considerations, and in the effort to hold together their estates in central Italy as a secure base for their ramifying international activities. In short, they became like any other rulers. The Gregorian reform, which sought to improve moral standards in the Church by disengaging the clergy from their role as supporters of the State, ended, by a kind of helpless logic, in thrusting the Church far more deeply and completely into the secular world. Indeed, the Church became a secular world of its own. As such - as a separate, rival institution - it was bound to come into conflict with the State at every level. Of course clerics and seculars were both Christians and shared not only major assumptions but most minor ones. But they were locked in a conflict of laws, and this could be brutally aggravated by a conflict of personalities. The outstanding case was Henry II'S tragic dispute with Thomas it Becket. Henry was only twenty-nine when he appointed Becket, his chancellor, to be chief ecclesiastical officer of his kingdom in 1162. He hoped that this combination of duties would help to smooth out difficulties which inevitably arose from the conflict of the two legal systems. After all, 'when business was over the King and he would sport together like boys of the same age; in hall or in church they sat together; together they went riding. . .' In fact this contemporary description fails to note that Becket was sixteen years older than the king, and already set in his ways. He was probably a bad influence over the young monarch: an obstinate insistence on the unequivocal acknowledgment of rights, and a fondness for extravagant gestures, marked Henry's policies when Becket was his chief adviser. In the 1160s, Henry, maturing, gradually adopted a much more conciliatory attitude to the world, and sought to woo opponents rather than shout them down, or smash them. He changed, and became a master of realpolitik. Becket remained the same: an obstinate and at times hysterical man, with an actor's passion for noisy drama. It was against this personal background that Henry's England felt the first full impact of the papal revolution. In the Conqueror's time, wrote Eadmer, ‘all things, spiritual and temporal alike, waited upon the nod of the King’; a council of bishops could not ‘lay down any ordinance or prohibition unless they were agreeable to the King's wishes, and had first been approved by him’; and a bishop could not, without the king's agreement, ‘take action against or excommunicate one of his barons or officials for incest or adultery or any other cardinal offence or even when guilt was notorious, lay upon him any penalty of ecclesiastical discipline. That was still the world of the Dark Ages. Under William Il, and Henry |, there had been a growing sense of antagonism between king and senior clerics; and during the disturbed period of Stephen's reign a progressive encroachment by the Church on royal legal territory. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that compromise was possible. The papal curia was not a monolithic organization; the curia was often divided itself, or sometimes imposed a restraining collective leadership on an impetuous pontiff. John of Salisbury, noting that Eugenius III'S decisions were often subsequently revoked, explains this by saying he was too ready to rely upon his personal opinion in imposing sentences’. At a local level, ecclesiastical authorities had their own motives for trying to avoid a showdown. Theodore, Becket's predecessor, Archbishop for instance, disliked appeals to Rome unless litigants ‘are in the grip of some necessity from which they cannot free themselves by their own efforts’. He thought that ‘the transgressions of malicious 5]