The great movement in favour of Church reform, which had emanated from
Cluny, had worked itself out along certain definite lines. It is
important to ask how far it had succeeded in achieving its objects. We
have seen that it was a movement of essentially monastic conception
aimed at the purification of the secular clergy. And we have seen that
the evil to be remedied had arisen from the imminent danger that the
Church would be laicised and feudalised. From the highest to the
lowest all ecclesiastical posts were at the disposition of laymen who
treated them as a species of feudal fief, so that the holders, even if
they were in Holy Orders (which was not always the case), regarded
their temporal rights and obligations as the first consideration and,
like all feudal tenants, tried to establish the right of hereditary
succession in their holdings. Thus the work of the reformers had been
of a double nature; it was not enough that they should aim at
exorcising the feudal spirit from the Church, at banishing the feudal
ideal from the minds of ecclesiastics: it was necessary to effect what
was indeed a revolution, and to shake the whole organisation of the
Church free from the trammels which close contact with the State had
laid upon it. It began as a reformation of morals; it developed into a
constitutional revolution. There was involved in the movement both an
interference with what might be distinguished as private rights and
also a readjustment of public relations. The reformers headed by the
Pope ultimately decided to concentrate their efforts on the latter.
Hence we may begin by enquiring how far they had succeeded in freeing
episcopal elections from lay control.

[Sidenote: Episcopal appointments.]

There were three several acts of the lay authority in connection with
the appointment of bishops to which the Church reformers took