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On the question of the trial of criminous clerks, which had given rise to these difficulties, it was provided, according to the best interpretation, that the accused clerk should be first brought before a secular court and there made to answer to the charge.
Where the whole of the clerical order presented a solid front, it was sometimes possible to make good a claim against which there was much to be said on grounds of common sense; as, for instance, benefit of clergy, the exclusive jurisdiction of the Church over criminous ecclesiastics, which was enforced even against a sovereign so powerful and so astute as Henry II of England.
So long as such things were possible, there could be no effective centralization and no supremacy of the national law. Within three months of the failure of his plan of taxation in the council at Woodstock the king made a formal demand of the Church to recognize the right of the State to punish criminous clerks. The bishops were summoned to a conference at Westminster on October 1.
None of the varied forms of the Newgate Calendar that criminous Who's Who? fails to accord her suitable if inaccurate notice. With other letter-writers of the time than the genial Horace the case forms a topical subject.
The King looked on the Church, as he looked on his barons and his exempted townships, as outside his royal supremacy, and, in consequence, quarrelled over investiture and criminous clerks, and every other point in which he had not as yet secured that his writs and judgments should prevail.
He would be quiet; he was in ridiculous and offensive earnest about his egregious Cure. Kinglake he would read by the hour together, day and night, by the hanging lamp, lying up-stairs on the best bed. There was daylight enough for me in the drawing-room below; and there I would sit immersed in criminous tomes weakly fascinated until I shivered and shook in my stocking soles.
The point most important to the State, which had led originally to the quarrel the question of the punishment of criminous clerks by the lay courts was passed over in silence, a way out of the difficulty being found by requiring of the king a promise which he could readily make, that he would wholly do away with any customs which had been introduced against the churches of the land in his time.
He told her, "very hard," unless she could support her story by the production of Cranstoun's letters. "Dear Mr. Fisher," said she, "I am afraid I have burnt some that would have brought him to justice. My honour to him will prove my ruin." If the letters afforded sufficient proof of Cranstoun's criminous intent, it hardly appears how the fact rhymes to Mary's innocence.
Thomas of Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concerned his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are therefore told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the King about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether "criminous clerks" should be punished by the State or the Church.
Nevertheless they still frequently visited the town, both for sport and duty. They had a park "six miles in compass," and the fishing in the Ure. The existence, moreover, of a prison here for criminous clerks made the minster a convenient place for the public degradations which the Archbishop was obliged to hold from time to time.
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