tithes, perjury, breach of faith, usury, witchcraft, heresy, proving of wills and blasphemy. The deans hated doing these jobs, which were unpaid. They hired apparitiors or summoners to deliver Episcopal warnings. These men were paid by results, but often engaged in blackmail and were generally hated. The bishops therefore turned to the churchwardens. In any case, it was really only the poor and humble who were in practice forced to conform to the Christian ideal, or rather punished when they did not. Powerful men would not have their morals controlled by bishops, let alone rural deans. When, around 1310, the Dean of Crewkerne served an Episcopal admonition on Sir Alan Ploknet, he found himself seized by the throat and forced to eat the bishop's letter, seal and all. The same principle applied to disciplining the clergy. The actual working clergy, living on stipends, were poor, and could be brought to book without too much trouble. Senior clergy, or pluralists - the two were often synonymous - who were more likely than most to break canon law or set a bad example, could fight the bishops in the courts. As the bishops had to pay the costs of such actions, which might well go to Rome, they left offenders alone. Thus the development of canon law, in theory designed to improve the morals of the clergy, in fact made improvement more difficult. The devaluation of the bishop was, for the clergy as a whole, perhaps the most baleful consequence of the reform program of the papacy. From the late eleventh century onwards they lost their power and independence in such matters as the liturgy, canonization, inspection of abbeys and convents, and definitions of law and doctrine. They were merely lines of communication to the Pope. Hence men who aspired to change and improve society, to carry through a Christian revolution, no longer, on the whole, sought bishoprics. These went, instead, to the younger sons of great territorial magnates, and to successful civil servants. They kept their wealth and their nominal status. Many of the 500 bishops of the Latin church could claim to occupy thrones which went back to the second century, or at any rate were older than any secular royal house. Thus the episcopate had to be treated as one of the key institutions of western society. When attempts were made to reform the Church in the fifteenth century, beginning with the papacy, it was natural to turn to the bishops, and to a revival of the conciliar system, to do the job. But they proved incapable of performing it. Crown and papacy, between them, had destroyed the once-powerful tradition of Episcopal initiative and leadership. At the fifteenth-century councils, the bishops tended to vote either by nationalities, in response to royal instructions, or in the supposed Roman interest. The idea of acting independently as an international college had been lost. The spring had broken in an institution which had had its origins in New Testament times. The destruction of Episcopal independence obviously enhanced papal authority within the Church; but the main beneficiary was the State. The Ambrosian bishop was a real check to royal power, as well as the Pope's. With the bishop reduced to a dignified functionary, the Pope was left on a lonely eminence, face to face with the secular world. Indeed, it could be said that papal policy had created this secular spirit, and turned it into an enemy. The Christian society of the ninth century, say, had been an entity. There was then no such thing as a ‘clerical world’ and a ‘secular world’. The Gregorian reforms had brought the idea of the secular state into existence by stripping the ruler of his sacerdotal functions. For a time this enhanced the Church's power, or appeared to. The superiority of the priestly element in society was emphasized, and the lay element was demoted along with the monarchy. There was a tendency to equate the clergy with 'the Church’. In the long run this was fatal to the whole concept of the Christian society. The lay element was initially put on the defensive but it eventually responded by developing its own modes of thought outside the assumptions of the Christian-clerical world. These modes were alien to Christianity, and ultimately hostile to it. Again, the idea of a militant clerical caste, with all the advantages of superior learning and sophisticated legal and administrative techniques, initially carried all before it. It was the first great trades union. But the secular world learnt from its methods. In the twelfth century, royal justice was a generation or two behind canon law, but it soon caught up. The old empire was destroyed, but kings took its place. They learnt to manipulate papal legal and administrative techniques, and copy them. The 56