On S. Hilary’s day the proposed council met at the royal hunting-seat of Clarendon near Salisbury.[113] Henry called upon the archbishop to fulfil the promise he had given at Oxford and publicly declare his assent to the customs. Thomas drew back. As he saw the mighty array of barons round the king—as he looked over the ranks of his own fellow-bishops—it flashed at last even upon his unsuspicious mind that all this anxiety to draw him into such a public repetition of a scene which he had thought to be final must cover something more than the supposed papal envoys had led him to expect, and that those “customs” which he had been assured were but a harmless word might yet become a terrible reality if he yielded another step. His hesitation threw the king into one of those paroxysms of Angevin fury which scared the English and Norman courtiers almost out of their senses. Thomas alone remained undaunted; the bishops stood “like a flock of sheep ready for slaughter,” and the king’s own ministers implored the primate to save them from the shame of having to lay violent hands upon him at their sovereign’s command. For two days he stood firm; on the third two knights of the Temple brought him a solemn assurance, on the honour of their order and the salvation of their souls, that his fears were groundless and that a verbal submission to the king’s will would end the quarrel and restore peace to the Church. He believed them; and though he still shrank from the formality, thus emptied of meaning, as little better than a lie, yet for the Church’s sake he gave way. He publicly promised to obey the king’s laws and customs loyally and in good faith, and made all the other bishops do likewise.[114]

The words were no sooner out of their mouths than Thomas learned how just his suspicions had been. A question was instantly raised—what were these customs? It was too late to discuss them that night; next morning the king bade the oldest and wisest of the barons go and make a recognition of the customs observed by his grandfather and bring up a written report of them for ratification by the council.[115] Nine days later[116] the report was presented. It comprised sixteen articles, known ever since as the Constitutions of Clarendon.[117] Some of them merely re-affirmed, in a more stringent and technical manner, the rules of William the Conqueror forbidding bishops and beneficed clerks to quit the realm or excommunicate the king’s tenants-in-chief without his leave, and the terms on which the temporal position of the bishops had been settled by the compromise between Henry I. and Anselm at the close of the struggle for the investitures. Another aimed at checking the abuse of appeals to Rome, by providing that no appeal should be carried further than the archbishop’s court without the assent of the king. The remainder dealt with the settlement of disputes concerning presentations and advowsons, which were transferred from the ecclesiastical courts to that of the king; the treatment of excommunicate persons; the limits of the right of sanctuary as regarding the goods of persons who had incurred forfeiture to the Crown; the ordination of villeins; the jurisdiction over clerks accused of crime; the protection of laymen cited before the Church courts against episcopal and archidiaconal injustice; and the method of procedure in suits concerning the tenure of Church lands.

The two articles last mentioned are especially remarkable. The former provided that if a layman was accused before a bishop on insufficient testimony, the sheriff should at the bishop’s request summon a jury of twelve lawful men of the neighbourhood to swear to the truth or falsehood of the charge.[118] The other clause decreed that when an estate was claimed by a clerk in frank-almoign and by a layman as a secular fief the question should be settled by the chief justiciar in like manner on the recognition of twelve jurors.[119] The way in which these provisions are introduced implies that the principle contained in them was already well known in the country; it indicates that some steps had already been taken towards a general remodelling of legal procedure, intended to embrace all branches of judicial administration and bring them all into orderly and harmonious working. In this view the Constitutions of Clarendon were only part of a great scheme in whose complete developement they might have held an appropriate and useful place.[120] But the churchmen of the day, to whom they were thus suddenly presented as an isolated fragment, could hardly be expected to see in them anything but an engine of state tyranny for grinding down the Church. Almost every one of them assumed, in some way or other, the complete subordination of ecclesiastical to temporal authority; the right of lay jurisdiction over clerks was asserted in the most uncompromising terms; while the last clause of all, which forbade the ordination of villeins without the consent of their lords, stirred a nobler feeling than jealousy for mere class-privileges. Its real intention was probably not to hinder the enfranchisement of serfs, but simply to protect the landowners against the loss of services which, being attached to the soil, they had no means of replacing, and very possibly also to prevent the number of criminal clerks being further increased by the admission of villeins anxious to escape from the justice of their lords. But men who for ages had been trained to regard the Church as a divinely-appointed city of refuge for all the poor and needy, the oppressed and the enslaved, could only see the other side of the measure and feel their inmost hearts rise up in the cry of a contemporary poet—“Hath not God called us all, bond and free, to His service?”[121]

The discussion occupied six days;[122] as each clause was read out to the assembly, Thomas rose and set forth his reasons for opposing it.[123] When at last the end was reached, Henry called upon him and all the bishops to affix their seals to the constitutions. “Never,” burst out the primate—“never, while there is a breath left in my body!”[124] The king was obliged to content himself with the former verbal assent, gained on false pretences as it had been; a copy of the obnoxious document was handed to the primate, who took it, as he said, for a witness against its contrivers, and indignantly quitted the assembly.[125] In an agony of remorse for the credulity which had led him into such a trap he withdrew to Winchester and suspended himself from all priestly functions till he had received absolution from the Pope.[126]