secular or episcopal courts; and that in the latter case a civil
officer should be present to report the proceedings, and the
defendant, if he were convicted in a criminal action, should lose his
benefit of clergy. This, however it might be called for by the
exigencies of the times, ought not to have been termed an ancient
custom. It was most certainly an innovation. It overturned the law as
it had invariably stood from the days of the Conqueror, and did not
restore the judicial process of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty.

III. It was ordered that "no tenant-in-chief of the king, no officer
of his household, or of his demesne, should be excommunicated, or his
lands put under an interdict, until application had been made to the
king, or in his absence to the grand justiciary, who ought to take
care that what belongs to the king's courts shall be there determined,
and what belongs to the ecclesiastical courts shall be determined in
them."

Sentences of excommunication had been greatly multiplied and abused
during the Middle Ages. They were the principal weapons with which the
clergy sought to protect themselves and their property from the
cruelty and rapacity of the banditti in the service of the barons.
They were feared by the most powerful and unprincipled, because, at
the same time that they excluded the culprit from the offices of
religion, they also cut him off from the intercourse of society. Men
were compelled to avoid the company of the excommunicated, unless they
were willing to participate in his punishment. Hence much ingenuity
was displayed in the discovery of expedients to restrain the exercise
of this power; and it was contended that no tenant of the crown ought
to be excommunicated without the king's permission, because it
deprived the sovereign of the personal services which he had a right