relation to subjects. The ratio dropped everywhere. It dropped, for instance, in England, until it was violently arrested and reversed by William I's conquest, which gave him one fifth of all the land in the country. Elsewhere, the crown continued to lose ground. Thus kings, for instance, had less control over local Officials, who established their rights as hereditary. Kings could not always protect the Church. They were too poor to reward military services, or to endow Church foundations. In fact, they often had to raid Church revenues to survive; and they tended to enforce hospitality from bishops and abbeys on their progresses without making expensive presents in return - they seemed, and were, an increasing burden. Thus in France, Germany and Italy, bishops were increasingly made by dukes and other local potentates, rather than kings. This made simony inevitable and widespread. The emperors were strong enough in the 1040s to restore order in Rome, and make the launching of a reform movement possible. It soon rocketed right out of their control. Perhaps this was inevitable. The quality of the higher clergy could not be improved unless its personnel were more Clearly distinguished from the brutal and materialist secular magnates. In 1057, Cardinal Humbert, the leading light of the Roman reformers, asserted in his Adversus Simoniacos Libri Tres, that bishops were elected by the clergy, and on request by the people, and that they were consecrated by the bishops of the province on the authority of the metropolitan: no mention of royal appointment or consent. Again, the papal election decree of 1059 made the choice depend firstly on the cardinal-bishops, then on the other cardinals: the participation of clergy and people was reduced to ratification. The idea was to differentiate sharply between clergy and laymen and, among clergy, between the various grades; above all, to make clergy independent of secular control. If the emperor replied: yes, but bishops perform secular tasks, as part of the State, the answer was St Paul's 'No one in God's service involves himself in secular business.' But if the emperor again replied: in that case, why should bishops enjoy fiefs like secular magnates, the answer was that their lands had been freely given to the Church, and had thus become God's property. A bishop was bound to protect his patrimony - as St Anselm put it: '| would not dare to appear before the judgment seat of God with the rights of my see diminished.’ The Church, in short, was insisting that it wanted the rights and privileges of the material world, without submitting to its criteria or assuming its burdens. Gregory VII brought the issue right out into the open by flatly denying the emperor's power to appoint or invest bishops, however important their temporal possessions might be to the running of the empire. He dismissed the idea of the emperor as a priest-king. There was, he insisted, an ancient and absolute distinction between clerics and lay people. And he denied the right of ‘emperors, kings and other lay persons, whether men or women' to presume ‘contrary to the Statutes of the holy fathers' to appoint to bishoprics and abbacies. Such actions were void, and the perpetrators excommunicate. The papal policy made the traditional empire unworkable. If the emperor could not dispose of bishoprics and abbacies, and their resources, in the pursuit of administrative order, authority would in practice fall into the hands of the imperial princes, and the realm would dissolve. Gregory was unmoved by this argument; or rather, he accepted the consequence and drew some radical conclusions from it. The State without the Church was nothing. Just as the spirit animated the body, so the Church ultimately determined the motions of the State. Indeed, the State, in carrying out its temporary functions, was merely exercising the authority delegated to it by the Church. Having dismissed the idea of a pontifical king he replaced it by the regal pontiff, thus turning the old imperial theory of government upside down. He looked right back into the past for inspiration. Above all he turned to the era of Constantine. It is fascinating to observe how, during the Gregorian reform period, pictorial comments on the Donation of Constantine appear in Italian mosaics and wall-decorations carried out under papal orders or inspiration. Some of these frescoes have disappeared, but we know them from sixteenth century drawings. Thus the Secret Council Chamber of the Lateran Palace the very room where Charlemagne once sat in judgment over a wily but frightened Lee Ill - was now covered with paintings of various popes, Gregory included, shown seated in 43