[25] De Officiis, 2. 16.

Where the king’s peace is not kept and the king’s writ does not run, men learn to rely on themselves.  Those who protect themselves with strength, discover the efficacy of force, and soon are not content to apply it merely on the defensive.  It is not surprising, therefore, to find in Erasmus’ day many cases of resort to violence to remedy defective titles.  Nowadays we never hear of a defeated candidate for a coveted post trying to obtain by force and right of possession the position which has been given to another.  It is unthinkable, for instance, that a Warden of Merton duly elected should have to eject from college some disappointed rival who had possessed himself of the Warden’s office and house:  as actually happened in 1562.  It is, perhaps, not so much that we have become more law-abiding, as that we realize that any such attempt must be fruitless when the strong arm of the State is at hand, ready to assert the rights of the lawful claimant.

In Erasmus’ day might was often right.  Thus in 1492 the Abbot of St. Bertin’s at St. Omer died, and the monks elected in his place a certain James du Val, who was duly consecrated in July 1493.  The Bishop of Cambray, however, had had the abbey in his eye for his younger brother Antony, who had been ejected ten years before by the powerful family of Arenberg from the Abbey of St. Trond in Limburg, and meanwhile had been living unemployed at Louvain.  The Bishop persuaded the Pope to annul du Val’s election and appoint Antony in his place, probably on some technical ground.  Armed with this permission he appeared at St. Omer in October 1493 and violently installed his brother; who held the abbey undisturbed till his death nearly forty years later.  The Bishop’s success with the Pope is the more noteworthy, as for a period of seven years he himself had refused to surrender an abbey near Mons to a papal nominee, who was not strong enough to wrest it from him.  Again, during the five years of the English occupation of Tournay, 1513-18, there was a continual struggle between two rival bishops, appointed when the see fell vacant in 1513—­Wolsey nominated by Henry VIII and Louis Guillard by the Pope.  It goes without saying that Wolsey won; and Guillard did not get in till 1519, the year after the evacuation by the English.

Fernand tells a story of violence at the monastery of Souillac, which was closely connected with his own at Chezal-Benoit.  When the Abbot died, a monk of St. Martin’s at Tours, who was a native of Souillac, with the aid of a brother who was a court official, got himself put in as abbot before the monks had time to elect.  They appealed to the king, but quite in vain; for instead of giving ear to their complaint he sent down a troop of soldiers to support the invading Abbot.  It was a grievous time for the poor monks.  The garrison did whatever they pleased:  imprisoned the faithful servants of the monastery, introduced hunting-dogs and birds, roared