It is also necessary to give some slight account of the machinery, so to speak, by which in early times the two powers were brought into relation, although this subject is far from being as clear as might be wished.
For this last subject, as well as for the earlier part of my sketch, I shall adopt as my chief guide the report of the late commission on the constitution &c. of the ecclesiastical courts, and therein and mainly the learned appendices to the same by the present Bishop of Oxford.
I. From these, then, we learn that in the early Saxon times a great deal of power, in ecclesiastical as in other matters, lay in the hands of the king. This we should expect from the fact that the Saxons had in those times been but recently converted, and that it must therefore have been largely by the permission or the co-operation of the king that the missionaries were permitted to exercise their functions at all, and so any relations of Church and State were established. We learn, further, that the king's power was by no means accurately defined, and depended in a great measure for its practical effect upon the strength or weakness of character of the individual king for the time being. But the example chosen by the commissioners to illustrate this fact is not an Anglo-Saxon king at all, but Charles the Great, whom they refer to as the type of a strong monarch, and whose influence on ecclesiastical affairs was certainly undeniable. No doubt, however, influence such as his was exercised in its degree by the Anglo-Saxon kings. During the whole of the pra3Norman period the ecclesiastical court appears to have been the court of the bishop, who sat together with the ealdorman, and took, as we might say, the ecclesiastical causes while the latter functionary disposed of the
