246 The Period or constitution Making
Gratian was a monk of Bologna, the centre of the revival,
and was a teacher in the law school there. Church law
had been very disorderly, and his was the first important
attempt to codify it. Such codification and clarifying
as Gratian gave it could not but increase its availability,
heighten its authority, and stimulate the already expand-
ing church courts. The Decretum came at a time when
England was especially open to its influence. So many
things were working to the same end that England, long
exceptional in the nationality of her church and her inde-
pendence of the pope, was no whit behind Prance or Italy
in her progress towards the Gregorian ideal.
When the great ruler and lawyer, Henry II., came to
the throne, he had to face the results of nineteen years of
weak rule, many of them of sheer anarchy. It is only to
be noticed here how he dealt with the advancing jurisdic-
tional claims of the church, which Stephen's reign had so
favoured. Four considerations go far to account for
Henry's action when, in 1163, he was at last free to look
into England's internal abuses. First, he found criminous
clerks no small element in the horde of unpunished crimi-
nals who were making governmental progress impossible:
1 'it was said that a hundred murders had been perpetrated
by clerks during Henry's reign before the king took ac-
tion."1 Second, he was conscious of the crippling of gov-
ernment that must follow if men belonging to an organisa-
tion so independent of, and out of harmony with, the
state could control a vast civil jurisdiction. Third, he
genuinely appreciated the good government of his grand-
father's time, and proposed to make it his model in his
work of restoration. Fourth, the ideas of his time were
not without their influence upon him and he had a great
respect for established law; he probably respected Gra-
1 P. and M. i, 454, note I. It is not to be supposed that the higher
clergy or many of the priests or even deacons were committing heinous
crimes. They were committed by those in the lowest clerical orders, who
took such orders as the concomitant of a minimum of education, and most
of whom probably did not look forward to the life of a priest. But they
formed a part of Henry's great peace problem. See above, pp. 144, 145.