that they would be detected, judged and deprived. But such a process implied a court. Whose court? Therein lay the difficulty. In the Dark Ages and Middle Ages everyone of any importance had his own court, where he judged subordinates. A man could not really be described as free unless he had his court. Indeed, he could not be fully free unless his court was supreme. As the German emperor Henry Ill put it, rather crudely, in the mid-eleventh century: 'For those who govern laws are not governed by laws, since the law, as they commonly say, has a nose of wax, and the King has an iron hand, and a long one, and he can bend the law in whatever way it pleases him.’ Who had the supreme court - king and emperor, or pope? Who could judge and depose whom? It was the same as asking who was the head of the body: the argument was circular. And since it could not be resolved by argument it was, in practice, determined by the balance of force. Until the latter part of the eleventh century, the balance lay heavily with the secular arm. Charlemagne had sat in judgment on the Pope, Leo III, and confirmed him in office after trial. In a letter to Leo, which has survived, he treats him, quite unambiguously, as merely the chief of his bishops. And bishops were royal functionaries. They helped to run the government; they sat as judges; they collected taxes; they acted as royal emissaries to distant parts of the domains; they took up station in royal fleets and armies, where they had definite roles to perform; and, perhaps most important of all, they helped the king or emperor to legislate. They were enormously well endowed in land to enable them to discharge these tasks. As such they buttressed the throne; they held lands and castles in trust to ensure the well-being of monarch and commonwealth. Naturally, then, the king, or emperor, appointed them; and he did so at a ceremony which emphasized their dependence on him. Indeed, he controlled and supervised the Church. More than half of the Carolingian legislation deals with church matters, ranging from the shape of bishop's beards to the fate of the bastard children of clergy. This system persisted long after the Carolingian empire fell into decay, and long after the imperial title, in 963, was vested in the new Salian line from Saxony. The German emperors, like their Frankish predecessors, ran their territories through state bishops, archbishops and abbots, whom they appointed and judged. The system was essentially the same in Spain, England and France. The ruler was, in effect, the head of the Church. The ambiguity appeared to have been resolved in his favor. Of course, he did not actually confer the sacraments. But in every other respect he was pontiff, a priest. That was one of the meanings of his coronation. The kings and bishops we see enthroned in the Beauvais Tapestry, from the late eleventh century, are almost interchangeable. For ceremonial occasions they dressed alike. In 1022, the Emperor Henry II presented the Abbey of Monte Cassino with a gospel codex; one of the illustrations shows him sitting in judgment: he is wearing a tippet, like the popes and the patriarchs - the same garment which Rome dispatched to archbishops in the West, as a symbol of their authority. The order of the royal coronations was strikingly similar to that used for the consecration of a bishop. Both began with a ritual procession of the elect to the church, preceded by relics: there was an identical formal interrogation to ensure the orthodoxy of the bishop/king. There then followed the unction of the head, breast, shoulders, both upper arms and hand (in the case of the king) and of head and arms (in the case of the bishop). Both were then invested with ring and staff, the king getting, in addition, the sword of State, pallium, bracelets and scepter. Both ceremonies concluded with the kiss of peace and high mass. Vestments and sandals worn were almost exactly the same; and the ring received by the Salian emperors, for instance, is variously described as ‘Episcopal’ or ‘pontifical’. The emperor was like a bishop, only he had many more duties; the ceremony was expanded accordingly. A famous and influential eleventh-century sermon, usually attributed to the reformist Peter Damian, describes the regal coronation as the Church's fifth sacrament, the Episcopal consecration as the fourth. The king, then, was an ecclesiastic - the kingship was a clerical office. He might hold others. From Henry Il onwards the Salians served as canons in various cathedral churches - Henry 4] |! at Bamberg,