there was not much possibility of change. In due course, and in certain areas, rulers were persuaded by reformers that it was their religious duty to amend matters: that was a different story. Nevertheless, though the system endured, it lost its appeal to the popular imagination. In the Dark Ages, the Church had stood for everything that was progressive, enlightened and humane in Europe; it had made, as we have seen, an enormous material contribution to the resurrection of civilization from the ashes and the raising of standards. It had created a continent in (with all its imperfections) a benign image. In the eleventh century, even in the twelfth, the Church - by which we now mean essentially the clergy - still preserved its identification with ameliorative change. At certain levels, the Gregorian reforms were undoubtedly popular. Many different categories of people, for a variety of reasons, welcomed an alternative power to the crown or (more usually) a clerical counterpoise to the local secular lord. Then, between 1150 and 1250, a fundamental change took place. Royal justice improved and manorial courts slipped into the background. Clerical sources of income came to be seen as exactions, and clerical privileges as abuses. The Church, as a hierarchical institution, ceased to be regarded with affection and respect; as a powerful phenomenon, it continued to inspire awe and fear, but the obedience it received was tinged with a growing element of hostility. Above all, the official Church began to be associated with financial exactions. We have hints of this even in the late twelfth century. Then, in the opening decades of the thirteenth, we have the first real evidence, at the lowest level, of resistance |>f payment of tithes; and, in more educated circles, of downright anti-clericalism. One such episode occurred in 1238, during the visit of a papal legate to Oxford. It began amicably, with the student-clerks paying what was intended to be a courtesy-call at the legate’s lodging. But there was a linguistic misunderstanding, and they were rudely refused admittance by the legate's Italian butler. Immediately, the atmosphere changed and latent hostility came to the surface. The students pushed their way in. A poor Irish chaplain, who happened to be begging at the back door, had a basin of scalding water flung in his face by the legate's brother. General fighting broke out, the clerks shouting: ‘Where is that usurer, that simoniac, robber of revenues and insatiate of money that, perverting our king and subverting our kingdom, plunders us to fill strangers’ coffers?’ The legate had to flee for his life, and there were long and complicated legal consequences. This kind of incident was unusual in the thirteenth century. The big change came in the next hundred years. Even around 1300 hardly anyone questioned either the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, or the validity of his legislative acts and appointments. By 1400 the papal plenitudo potestatis, and the whole medieval ecclesiastical system was being openly and repeatedly challenged. Of course the intensity and the subject matter of criticism varied from place to place. England, for instance, came of age linguistically and culturally in the fourteenth century, and an emergent xenophobia, force-fed by the war with France, identified the papacy and thus the Church as an international institution with the French cause. It was a commonplace to say: ‘The Pope is French, but Jesus Christ is English.’ On the other hand, the fourteenth century identification of the papacy with France did not make it any more popular with Frenchmen; on the contrary. The papacy never really recovered from the move to Avignon. It lost the magic of the imperial connection. Much more important, it was no longer associated with the radiating power of the dead apostle Peter. It is true that, by the fourteenth century, the cult of relics was very much on the decline - by the time the popes moved back to Rome it was virtually dead - or perhaps one should say that relics no longer inspired total belief and real fear, but rather appealed to the residual superstition of all. On the other hand, the popes in Rome were a metaphysical fact, on top of everything else; in Avignon, they were simply an institution. In 1300, 200,000 people had come to Rome for the jubilee; Christians did not come to Avignon except on business. It worked far more efficiently than the old Roman curia. It was more centralized. Avignon generated more missionary activity than Rome, and a great deal more diplomacy. It was a brilliant 60