CLARENDON, CONSTITUTIONS OF. Certain statutes made in the reign of Henry IL at a parliament held at Clarendon (A. D. 1164) by which the king checked the pow er of the pope and his clergy and greatly narrowed the exemption they claimed from secular jurisdiction.
Previous to this time, there had been an entire separation between the clergy and laity, as mem bers of the same commonwealth. The clergy, hav ing emancipated themselves from the laws as ad ministered by the courts of law, had assumed pow ers and exemptions quite inconsistent with the good government of the country.
This state of things led to the enactment referred to. By this enactment all controversies arising out of ecclesiastical matters were required to be deter mined in the civil courts, and all appeals in spiritu al causes were to be carried from the bishops to the primate, and from him to the king, but no further without the king's consent. The archbishops and
bishops were to be regarded as barons of the realm, possessing the privileges and subject to the bur dens belonging to that rank, and bound to attend the king in his councils. The revenues of vacant sees were to belong to the king, and goods forfeited to him by law were no longer to be protected in churches or church-yards. Nor were the clergy to pretend to the right of enforcing the payment of debts in cases where they had been accustomed to do so, but should leave all lawsuits to the nation of the civil courts. The rigid enforcement of these statutes by the king was unhappily stopped, for a season, by the fatal event of his disputes with Archbishop Becket. Fitz Stephen 27; 2 Lingara 59; 1 Hume 382; Wilkins 321; 4 Bla. Corn. 422; / Poll. & M. 430-440, 461; 2 id. 196.