62 English and Continental Backgrounds
kings.1 In this connection it is specially important to
note that the Anglo-Saxon church had as much unity
when England consisted of several separate and hostile
kingdoms as after an approach to a single state had been
reached under the West Saxon dynasty. Considerations
of geography and race had made it natural for the pope
and for others influential in its organisation in the early
days so to shape it. In the ecclesiastical realm, the Anglo-
Saxons must, from the start, have thought of themselves as
one people or at most divided into two provinces. Theo-
retically the English church, like the other churches of
western Europe, remained tinder the control of the pope,
but its distance and its insularity worked towards a
weakening of the connection, and in practice that control
or any papal interference amounted to little.
In judicial matters, the union of church and state was
even closer. The clergy were amenable to the hundred
and shire courts in all matters of which these courts took
cognisance; they were under their jurisdiction to the same
extent that laymen were. Hence the presence of bishop
and priest. In criminal cases, a special procedure was
necessary in the case of clerks, and the bishop was in the
court, "in the relation of lord and patron/' to declare
what this procedure was. But the bishop was also re-
garded as a learned and needed member of the court with
respect to its jurisdiction over laymen, especially in mat-
ters touching morals. There were some distinctly clerical
offences, breaches of ecclesiastical regulations, heresy, and
the like, that
would not come before the popular courts, for they were not
breaches of the secular law; and they were not crimes for
which the penitential jurisdiction alone was sufficient. For
such, then, it is probable that the bishops had domestic
tribunals not differing in kind from the ecclesiastical courts
of later ages.2
* See Joseph C. Ayer, Church Councils of the Anglo-Saxons t printed in
Papers of the American Society of Church History.
* Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, § 87.