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THE GREEN BAG
sixty miles. It was the monks . . . who turned the wilderness into a fruitful field." So much for the means — some credit able, others disreputable — whereby one half of the richest kingdom of Europe passed under Churchly control. The great and far reaching effect of this preponderance of influence is readily seen. It enables the Church at times to stand for the rights of the people, and as in the case of William Rufus and Henry II, to keep in check natures so arbitrary and cruel as to brook no control founded on right or reason, when it conflicted with their own love of power. This influence certainly made for good; but there were other departments where the great extent of Church property endangered the state, as in the time of Edward III, 1377, when, as Hume informs us, "The taxes levied by the Pope exceeded five times those which were paid to the King. " Thus, too, in the matter of raising an army, the possession of vast tracts of territory by clerics, was a distant^ element of weakness. Not only were the monks and the parish clergy — numbering in all some forty thou sand souls, about one-fifth of the total population — exempt from service in war, but their lands were not required to provide a proportionate quota of the knights and armed retainers who together made up the armies of the feudal system. For the whole system was founded upon such an apportion ment, and whoever will look into the "Doomsday Book" will see how carefully the Conqueror defined the burden which each manor or other estate was obliged to bear in the national defense. As an indication of the generalness of such armament, in 1252 all holders of forty shillings in lands, were expected to equip themselves with "a sword, dagger, bows and arrows. " The preponderance of Church lands did therefore constitute a distinct menace to the State, by withdrawing a great source of men and supplies in time of public peril.
Nor was this all. 'The exchequer of those days, as now, was in large measure depen dent upon the taxes collected at time of death, and on stated occasions, such as marriage, knighthood, etc., for the support of the nobility and of the government. All or most of these sources of income were cut off, where the title became vested in "dead hands." The Church being a cor poration, property once passing into its control was lost to the State, for many purposes. It was this feature which brought about the first statutes of mortmain, and which led to a general policy of restraint — "for that," in the quaint language of Coke, "a dead hand yieldeth no service." In Saxon England, it appears probable that some sort of license was required to authorize a conveyance to the Church, though this provision seems to have been little enforced. Frederick Barbarossa was the first Euro pean monarch to limit, in 1158, the right of transfer of fiefs to the Church, though Louis IX. afterward passed similar enactments, and such a restriction was enforced in Castile. The Barons included a like provision in Magna Charta, in 121 5, and this clause in time was construed to prohibit all gifts to the religious houses, without the consent of the lord of the fee — "And by the seventh Edward I," says Hallam, "alienations in mortmain are absolutely taken away." In Blackstone there occurs this tribute to the ablest of England's kings, and to his attempt to stay a great abuse: " Edward the First, who hath been justly styled our English Justinian, . . . effectually closed the great gulfs, in which all the landed property of the kingdom was in danger of being swallowed up, by his repeated statutes of mortmain; most admirably adapted to meet the frauds which had been devised, though afterward contrived to be evaded by the invention of uses." This subject of "uses" not only introduces a novel and most interesting chapter in the
