of Toulouse, he allowed the lower tenants to commute their service for sums payable to the royal treasury under the name of “scutage,” or shield-money.  The “Great Scutage” did much to disarm the baronage, while it enabled the king to hire foreign mercenaries for his service abroad.  Again however he was luckless in war.  King Lewis of France threw himself into Toulouse.  Conscious of the ill-compacted nature of his wide dominion, Henry shrank from an open contest with his suzerain; he withdrew his forces, and the quarrel ended in 1160 by a formal alliance and the betrothal of his eldest son to the daughter of Lewis.

[Sidenote:  Archbishop Thomas]

Henry returned to his English realm to regulate the relations of the State with the Church.  These rested in the main on the system established by the Conqueror, and with that system Henry had no wish to meddle.  But he was resolute that, baron or priest, all should be equal before the law; and he had no more mercy for clerical than for feudal immunities.  The immunities of the clergy indeed were becoming a hindrance to public justice.  The clerical order in the Middle Ages extended far beyond the priesthood; it included in Henry’s day the whole of the professional and educated classes.  It was subject to the jurisdiction of the Church courts alone; but bodily punishment could only be inflicted by officers of the lay courts, and so great had the jealousy between clergy and laity become that the bishops no longer sought civil aid but restricted themselves to the purely spiritual punishments of penance and deprivation of orders.  Such penalties formed no effectual check upon crime, and while preserving the Church courts the king aimed at the delivery of convicted offenders to secular punishment.  For the carrying out of these designs he sought an agent in Thomas the Chancellor.  Thomas had now been his minister for eight years, and had fought bravely in the war against Toulouse at the head of the seven hundred knights who formed his household.  But the king had other work for him than war.  On Theobald’s death he forced on the monks of Canterbury his election as Archbishop.  But from the moment of his appointment in 1162 the dramatic temper of the new Primate flung its whole energy into the part he set himself to play.  At the first intimation of Henry’s purpose he pointed with a laugh to his gay court attire:  “You are choosing a fine dress,” he said, “to figure at the head of your Canterbury monks”; once monk and Archbishop he passed with a fevered earnestness from luxury to asceticism; and a visit to the Council of Tours in 1163, where the highest doctrines of ecclesiastical authority were sanctioned by Pope Alexander the Third, strengthened his purpose of struggling for the privileges of the Church.  His change of attitude encouraged his old rivals at court to vex him with petty lawsuits, but no breach had come with the king till Henry proposed that clerical convicts should be punished by the civil power.  Thomas refused; he would only consent that a clerk, once degraded, should for after offences suffer like a layman.  Both parties appealed to the “customs” of the realm; and it was to state these “customs” that a court was held in 1164 at Clarendon near Salisbury.