354 LYNDWOOD'S PROVINCIALE. [XIII. drawn up under Sixtus V as late as 1588; so that practically it lies outside our comparative view. Of course very much of the spirit of both the sixth book and the Clementines found its way into England, but the statute law was increasing in vigour, the kings were increasing in vigilance, and after the pontificate of Clement V the hold of the papacy on the nation was relaxing. Occasionally we find an archbishop like Stratford using the papal authority and asserting high ecclesiastical claims against the king, but the age of the Statutes of Praemunire and Provisors was come, and no wholesale importation of foreign law was possible. Not to multiply details, I will summarily state that in the reign of Henry V William Lyndwood, the Dean of the Arches, collected, arranged, and annotated the accepted Constitutions of the Church of England in his Provinciale, which, with the collections of John of Ayton generally found in the same volume, became the authoritative canon law of the realm. It of course was proper in the first instance to the province of Canterbury, but in 1462 the Convocation of York accepted the Constitutions of the southern province as authoritative wherever they did not differ from those of York, and from the earlier date the compilation was received as the treasury of law and practice. Nor were any very material additions made to it before the Reformation; for although the Church of England was deeply involved in the transactions of the Council of Basel, and might, if the matter had been broached as distinctly as it was in France, have formally accepted its canons, no such incorporation of those canons ever took place here as was accomplished in the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges in 1438. Still, authoritative as Lyndwood's code undoubtedly was, it was rather as the work of an expert than as a body of statutes that it had its chief force. The study of the canon law was a scientific and professional, not merely mechanical study; and