and Louis VI of France seem to have conceded the same right without
any formal agreement. But many of the great French feudal lords clung
to their power over the local bishoprics, and in Normandy, in Anjou,
and in some parts of the south nearly a century elapsed before the
duke or count surrendered his custom of nominating bishops directly.
But the freedom of election by the Canons of the cathedral, even when
it was conceded, was little more than nominal. In England, France, and
the Christian kingdoms of Spain no cathedral body could exercise its
right without the King's leave to elect, nor was any election complete
without the royal confirmation. By the Concordat of Worms elections
were to take place in the presence of the King or his commissioners.
By the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) English bishops must be
elected in the royal chapel. King John tried to bribe the Church over
to his side in the quarrel with the barons which preceded Magna Carta,
by conceding that elections should be free--that is, should take
place in the chapter-house of the cathedral; but even he reserved the
royal permission for the election to be held, and the _conge
d'elire_ in England and elsewhere was accompanied by the name of
the individual on whom the choice of the electoral body should fall.
It was not the rights of the electors but the all-pervading authority
of the Pope which was to prove the chief rival of royal influence in
the local Church.

[Sidenote: Investiture.]

The quarrel between Church and State had centred round the ceremony of
investiture, because in the eyes of the reformers the most scandalous
result of the feudalisation of the Church was the acceptance at the
hands of a layman of the spiritual symbols of ring and crozier. But as
Hugh of Fleury had acknowledged in his tract on "Royal Power and