From these and other sources the wealth which poured in upon the
Church was enormous. Individual gifts in money or in kind as
thank-offerings on all sorts of occasions reached no small of the
total; while no religious ceremony, from baptism to extreme unction
and burial, could be carried out apart from the payment of an
appropriate fee. The clergy constantly complained of spoliation, and
no doubt individuals suffered much. The very laymen who, with the
title of advocates, undertook to defend a cathedral or a monastery
were often its worst robbers. But the endowments and revenues of the
Church were so extensive as to raise in the minds of many reformers
the question whether they were not largely responsible for her
corruptions.

[Sidenote: Immunity from lay jurisdiction.]

The clergy also sought freedom from the jurisdiction of the secular
courts; in other words, the Church claimed exclusive cognisance in her
own tribunals of all matters concerning those in Holy Orders. The
_Decretiun_ of Gratian--the text-book of Canon Law--laid it down
that in civil matters the clergy were to be brought before a civil
judge, but that a criminal charge against a clerk must be heard before
the bishop. Urban II, however, declares that all clergy should be
subject to the bishop alone, and the Synod of Nimes (1096), at which
he presided, stigmatises it as sacrilege to hale clerks or monks
before a secular court. Alexander III (1179) threatens to
excommunicate any layman guilty of this offence; while Innocent III
points out that a clerk is not even at liberty to waive the right of
trial in an ecclesiastical court in a matter between him and a layman,
because the spiritual jurisdiction is not a matter personal to