capable of it; homage and fealty were required on the part of the spiritual vassal; the king, on his part, gave the bishop the investiture, or livery and seizin of his temporalities, by the delivery of a ring and staff.  This was the original manner of granting feudal property, and something like it is still practised in our base-courts.  Pope Adrian confirmed this privilege to Charlemagne by an express grant.  The clergy of that time, ignorant, but inquisitive, were very ready at finding types and mysteries in every ceremony:  they construed the staff into an emblem of the pastoral care, and the ring into a type of the bishop’s allegorical marriage to his church, and therefore supposed them designed as emblems of a jurisdiction merely spiritual.  The Papal pretensions increased with the general ignorance and superstition; and the better to support these pretensions, it was necessary at once to exalt the clergy extremely, and, by breaking off all ties between them and their natural sovereigns, to attach them wholly to the Roman see.  In pursuance of this project, the Pope first strictly forbade the clergy to receive investitures from laymen, or to do them homage.  A council held at Rome entirely condemned this practice; and the condemnation was the less unpopular, because the investiture gave rise to frequent and flagrant abuses, especially in England, where the sees were on this pretence with much scandal long held in the king’s hands, and afterwards as scandalously and publicly sold to the highest bidder.  So it had been in the last reign, and so it continued in this.

Henry, though vigorously attacked, with great resolution maintained the rights of his crown with regard to investitures, whilst he saw the Emperor, who claimed a right of investing the Pope himself, subdued by the thunder of the Vatican.  His chief opposition was within his own kingdom.  Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, a man of unblamable life, and of learning for his time, but blindly attached to the rights of the Church, real or supposed, refused to consecrate those who received investitures from the king.  The parties appealed to Rome.  Rome, unwilling either to recede from her pretensions or to provoke a powerful monarch, gives a dubious answer.  Meanwhile the contest grows hotter.  Anselm is obliged to quit the kingdom, but is still inflexible.  At last, the king, who, from the delicate situation of his affairs in the beginning of his reign, had been obliged to temporize for a long time, by his usual prudent mixture of management with force obliged the Pope to a temperament which seemed extremely judicious.  The king received homage and fealty from his vassal; the investiture, as it was generally understood to relate to spiritual jurisdiction, was given up, and on this equal bottom peace was established.  The secret of the Pope’s moderation was this:  he was at that juncture close pressed by the Emperor, and it might be highly dangerous to contend with two such enemies at once; and he was much more ready to yield to Henry, who had no reciprocal demands on him, than to the Emperor, who had many and just ones, and to whom he could not yield any one point without giving up an infinite number of others very material and interesting.