of appeals;]

By this time, too, appeals to Rome against the decisions of English
courts had come to be a great bar to national independence. Such
appeals had been altogether unrecognized in England until the days of
Stephen, and the practice was again forbidden in Henry II.'s reign by
the Constitutions of Clarendon (A.D. 1164); but, after Becket's death,
the prohibition was once more repealed. It is easy to see how
seriously this system of appeals must have delayed and interfered with
the regular course of justice in this country, and how capable it was
of being made a political engine in the hands of the Pope, or of those
who held with him. The exemption of most of the monasteries from the
supervision of the Bishops was also a serious evil, interfering as it
did with the Divinely-appointed functions of the episcopacy, and
opening the door to disorders which the distant and usurped authority
of the Popes had not power to remedy.

[Sidenote: by large money payments.]

In the fourteenth century another means was resorted to of increasing
the power of the Popes at expense of the monarch and people of {149}
England, by the payment of annates, or first-fruits, on the appointment
of each Bishop; and so heavy did this burden become, that between A.D.
1486 and A.D. 1531, 160,000 pounds (or about 45,000 pounds a year of
our money) was paid to Rome under the head of annates.

[Sidenote: All these evils borne under protest.]

It is not to be supposed that these encroachments of a foreign power
were accepted without a murmur or remonstrance on the part of the
people of England; on the contrary, there was a constant undercurrent
of discontent, which found occasional expression in some official or
popular protest. Such, on the one hand, was the statute of
_praemunire_, passed in the reign of Richard II. (A.D. 1389), to
prohibit Papal interference with Church patronage and decisions in
ecclesiastical causes; and, on the other, the irregular proceedings of
Wickliffe and the Lollards, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
which, though they eventually degenerated into seditious agitation, had
their rise in a feeling of opposition to Romish abuses and usurpations.
This feeling was increased by the fearful state of profligacy into
which Rome, and indeed all Italy, was plunged during the fifteenth
century, which effectually destroyed the character formerly enjoyed by
the Roman Church, whilst it could not but affect the spir