opportunity, than Henry II. The time had come to set limits to the
encroachments of feudalism and of the church, and Edward was able to
impose them because, unlike Henry II, he had the elements of a nation
at his back. He was not able to sweep back these inroads, but he placed
high-water marks along the frontiers of the state, and saw that they
were not transgressed. He inquired into the titles by which the great
lords held those portions of sovereign authority which they called
their liberties; but he could take no further action when Earl Warenne
produced a rusty sword as his effective title-deeds. He prohibited
further subinfeudation by enacting that when an estate was sold, the
purchaser should become the vassal of the vendor's lord and not of the
vendor himself; and the social pyramid was thus rendered more stable,
because its base was broadened instead of its height being increased.
He expelled the Jews as aliens, in spite of their usefulness to the
crown; he encouraged commerce by making profits from land liable to
seizure for debt; and he defined the jurisdiction of the church, though
he had to leave it authority over all matters relating to marriage,
wills, perjury, tithes, offences against the clergy, and ecclesiastical
buildings. He succeeded, however, in defiance of its opposition, in
making church property liable to temporal taxation, and in passing a
Mortmain Act which prohibited the giving of land to monasteries or
other corporations without the royal licence.

By thus increasing the national control over the church in England, he
made the church itself more national. It is sometimes implied that the
church was equally national throughout the Middle Ages; but it is
difficult to speak of a national church before there was a nation, or
to see that there was anything really English in a church ruled by
Lanfranc or Anselm, when there was not an Englishman on the bishops'
bench, when the vast majority of Englishmen were legally incapable as