The King’s Great Council.of the Saxon ‘Wise men’, and which became the direct father of our House of Lords, there would sit perhaps 150 great lay barons, nineteen bishops, and some thirty abbots; but the churchmen would be the most learned, the most cunning and the most regular attendants. Though this Great Council met only for a few days in each year, the King would need secretaries and lawyers and officials of one kind or another to be continually about his person; and most of these would be churchmen, whom he would reward with bishoprics and abbeys and livings. So far as there was what we now call a ‘Ministry’ or a ‘Privy Council’, it consisted mainly of churchmen.
Quarrels of the King with the Church.So powerful indeed was the Church that quarrels between it and the strong kings were of frequent occurrence during the next century or two. The churchmen were too apt to look to the Pope as their real head instead of the King. The popes always tried to keep the Church independent of the King. They wanted the clergy to pay no taxes for their lands, to have separate courts of justice, to be governed by other laws than those of the laymen, and yet to be wholly defended by the kings and laymen. Now no good king approved of these demands, which were indeed monstrous if you consider that the clergy owned between one-quarter and one-third of the land of England, and were getting more and more, from gifts by pious laymen, every day. William I had to allow the Church to have separate courts of justice, but he had no actual quarrel with the Pope, mainly because his archbishop, Lanfranc, was a very wise man. William I and Henry I each had sharp quarrels with Archbishop Anselm, while as for poor Stephen, he was at the mercy of the great bishops.
