himself, but belongs to the whole clerical body. Finally Frederick II,
on his coronation at Rome in 1220, forbade any one to dare to indict
an ecclesiastic on either a civil or a criminal charge before a
secular tribunal. But meanwhile the frequent perpetration of violent
crimes by those who wore the tonsure made it imperative in the
interests of social order that the Church should not be allowed to
defend these criminals in order to save her own interests.

The fiercest struggle took place in England. Henry II did not deny the
right of the Church to jurisdiction over her members; but he demanded
that clerks found guilty of grave crime should be unfrocked by the
ecclesiastical court, and that then, being no longer clerks, they
should be handed over to the royal officers, by whom they should be
punished according to their deserts. Archbishop Thomas Becket answered
that it was contrary to justice and the Canon Law that a man should be
punished twice for the same offence; that the punishment by the Church
involved the offender's damnation and was therefore quite adequate;
and that finally he himself was officially bound to defend the
liberties of the Church even to the death. Henry II attempted to solve
the difficulty by issuing the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164), the
third clause of which decreed that the royal officer should determine
whether any matter in which a clerk was concerned should be tried in
the secular or the ecclesiastical court, and that even if it went to
the latter, the King's officer should be present at the hearing. As
the price, however, of his reconciliation with the Papacy after
Becket's death, Henry was obliged to withdraw the Constitutions.

The position of the Church on this question was clearly stated by Pope
Celestine III in 1192. If a clerk had been lawfully convicted of
theft, homicide, perjury, or any capital crime, he should be degraded