monastic orders, which belonged, as already noticed, to all countries alike.
Almost at the beginning of the period with which we are concerned this division became visible. At the very time when Becket was contending with his sovereign almost on equal terms, Walter de Map, himself a churchman, was working up his portrait, or rather his caricature, of the churchmen of his day in his character of Bishop Golias. Nevertheless, we must remember that it was Becket and not Walter de Map who was the representative churchman of the time. Walter was but the clever literary semi-professional man of the world—a sort of twelfth-century 'Saturday Reviewer,' whose churchmanship just supplied him with enough knowledge ab intra to make him a pungent critic, but whose point of view was not that of the man who made history, but of the clever, somewhat cynical bystander; and his pictures those, not of the great portrait-painter, but of the great caricaturist of his day. In those days Church and Crown fought each ' for his own hand,' and, as I have said, almost on equal terms. They sought the alliance, one of the Pope, the other of the baronage; but while the one sought the aid of the Pope as a vassal that of his lord, the other, not always with success, claimed the assistance of the barons as a lord commanding his vassals, and both alike made but little account of the people.
What we are to trace in this chapter is not alone a struggle between the Pope and the Crown, though this is constantly recurring, but there are, besides these two the barons, the clergy, and the people, all more or less parties to the struggle, and shifting in their alliances between the one side and the other as their particular interests at the time persuade them, and the perplexity
