thirty-five up to 1130, 179 under Alexander III, 1159-81, 280 by the turn of the thirteenth century and 3646 by the beginning of the fourteenth. Virtually all this business was legal. Of course, the twelfth century was an age of legal discovery and expansion generally. Every other kind of court, especially the royal court, was expanding fast. But canon law, radiating from Rome, set the pace and kept the lead by far. The run-up to the canonical explosion took about seventy years, from 1070-1140; then, in a mere decade, it suddenly became a universal fact of life. We saw how the notions of Christianity penetrated deep Into every crevice of society in the Carolingian period; now, a papally-controlled legal system suddenly moved into the forefront of every individual's experience. It began to settle vast areas of ordinary life in great and expen sive legal detail: the administration of the Sacraments and all other aspects of the strictly religious side of existence; the rights, duties. payments and obligations of the humblest parish priest and his congregation; the dress, education, ordination, status, crimes, punishment s of clerics; charity, alms, USUrY, wills, graveyards, churches, prayers, masses for the dead, burials, marriage, inheritance, legitimacy, sex and morals. Until the 1 040s, the popes had only a vague idea of what was going on at the highest level in places like England, north Germany or Spain; a hundred years later, in 1144, we find Luciu s || writing to the bishops of Hereford and Worcester ordering them jointly to settle a dispute about a parish church in the diocese of Lichfield. The legal revolution enormously strengthened the hands of the papacy because to be able to dispense justice effectively was, to medieval man, a chief sign of power. The growth of papal law was both a cause of the papacy's claim to total sovereignty, and the means whereby successive emperors were humbled or smashed. On the other hand, it gradually turned the Papacy, and so the Church as a whole, into a totally different kind of institution. It became not so much a divine society, as a legal one; and a legal society increasingly divorced from the total society surrounding it. Its verbal integuments were no longer the scriptures, but canon law. About 1140 appeared the great Concordia Discordantium Canonum, known as the Decreta, compiled by Gratian. This was, in a sense, the last of a long line of more primitive canonical collections; it provided a systematic exposition of a vast corpus of ancient church law and did it so thoroughly that further efforts to codify the past were superfluous. It distinguished between necessary law, as laid down in scripture; and convenient law, formulated by the Church in the interests of discipline and the cure of souls. The first was immutable, the second might be relaxed, in a variety of ways and for many different purposes; and this dispensary power was an inherent function of the papal office. The theory of Gratian, and the practice of the papal court, was thus the culmination of a long process, beginning in the second century, whereby the Church interposed itself between the code of conduct divinely ordained in the scriptures, and the obligations and prescriptions actually enforced on Christianity. The tendency, therefore, was to replace pastoral theology with legal interpretation and administration, as the chief preoccupation of the Church. From the time of Gregory VII onwards, all the outstanding popes were lawyers; the papal court, or curia, became primarily a legal organization, with over a hundred experts employed there by the thirteenth century, plus other lawyers who looked after the interests of kings, princes and leading ecclesiastics. Most of the popes' advisers were canonists. As Roger Bacon bitterly remarked, for every theologian in Innocent \v's entourage there were twenty lawyers. Popes tended to get bogged down in legal business. St Bernard, a papalist and a clericalist, but a man who kept the prime pastoral function of the Church constantly before his eyes, thought the papacy'’s concern with the legal nexus was obsessive: ‘Why do you sit from morning until evening,’ he wrote to Eugenius Ill in 1150, listening to litigants? What fruit is there in these things? They can only create cobwebs.' His warnings were Ignored. The litigious habit gradually permeated the whole Church. Ecclesiastical institutions tended to see their relationship with the lay world, and with each other, primarily in legal terms. The most bitterly fought and enduring cases were inter-clerical battles. One such medieval Jarndyce v. Jarndyce between the monks of St Augustine, Canterbury, and their archbishop, was hotly contested for fifteen years, succe ssive 50