No question seems to have been raised as to some of the statutes which were certainly of recent growth, though they touched Church interests.  One of these repeated unreservedly the assertion that bishops held a feudal position in all points the same as that of barons or direct vassals of the king, being bound by all their obligations, and entitled to sit with them in judgment in the Curia Regis till it came to a question of blood.  Others dealt with disorders which had grown up from the mutual jealousy of Church and lay courts, and the difficulties thus thrown in the way of administering laws which were not disputed; rules were made for the securities to be taken from excommunicated persons; for the giving up to the king of forfeited goods of felons deposited in churches or churchyards; and forbidding the ordination of villeins without their lord’s consent,—­a provision which possibly was intended to prevent the withdrawal of an unlimited number of people from secular jurisdiction.  Two other clauses touched upon the new legal remedies, the use of the jury in the accusation of criminals, and in the decision of questions of property; it was decreed that laymen should not be accused in Church courts save by lawful witness, or by the twelve legal men of the hundred—­in other words, by the newly-developed jury of “presentation”; while the jury of “recognition” was ordered to be used in disputed titles to ecclesiastical estates.

The real strife was about the seven remaining statutes, which declared that an accused clerk must first appear before the king’s court, and that the justiciar should then send a royal officer with him to watch the trial at the ecclesiastical court, and if he were found guilty the Church should no longer protect him; that the chief clergy might not leave the realm without the king’s permission; that appeals might not be carried to the Papal Court without the king’s consent; that no tenant-in-chief of the king might be excommunicated without the leave of the king; that the revenues of vacant sees should fall to the king, until a new appointment had been made in his court; that questions of advowsons or presentations to livings questions which at that time represented comparatively a vast amount of property—­should be tried in the king’s court; and that the king’s judges should decide in matters of debt, even where the case included a question of perjury or broken faith, which was claimed as a matter for ecclesiastical jurisdiction.  Such laws as these were no doubt in Henry’s mind simply part of his scheme for establishing a general order and one undivided authority in the realm.  But they opened very much wider grounds of dispute between Church and State than the mere question of how criminal clerks were to be dealt with.  They boldly attacked the whole of the pretensions of the Church; they threatened to rob it of a mass of financial business, to wrest from its control an enormous amount of property, to deprive it of jurisdiction in the great majority of criminal suits, to limit its power of irresponsible self-government, and to prevent its absorption into the vast organization of the Church of Western Christendom.  They defined the relations of the English Church to the see of Rome.  They established its position as a national Church, and declared that its clergy should be brought under the rule of national law.