I. Acta Episcoporum

Abstract

It has probably occurred to many people that a slight air of unreality overhangs our conception of the relations between church and state in England in the twelfth century. We know the main questions at issue, and something at least of the personalities engaged upon them. We possess much correspondence—ill edited, on the whole, but still illuminating. We have also much biographical matter. Above all, in the Constitutions of Clarendon we have an official statement of what the king claimed, and his bishops could not deny to be the ancient customs of the realm. It is not surprising that the twelfth-century church in England has sometimes been treated by modern writers in a way which would suggest that little more remains to be learned about it.