EARLY JEALOUSIES. 3 64 scientific education on both sides. Sometimes there was, as was natural, a little inconsistency and awkwardness ; the bowsprit got mixed up with the rudder; as when Morton, at once archbishop and chancellor, allowed his judgment on a fraudulent executor to be modified by the reflexion that he would be 'damnée in hell' But this may have been exceptional. It must not however be supposed that the fault in this rivalry was altogether to be ascribed to the canonists. The English-trained lawyer was as infallible in that age as in this; and when we find him, and his brethren in the parliament, constantly hampering the legitimate work of the church, we see that there were two sides to the question ; when in the fourteenth century the Commons petition that the clergy may not make in their convocation canons to bind the laity, it is rather a relief to find that the canons in question relate to tithe of underwood : but when in 1446 we find the clergy remonstrating that the professional lawyers 'pretended privilege, by what right,' they say, 'we know not, to interpret acts of parliament and explain the mind of the legislature, and by thus practising upon the statutes sometimes ground their opinion on mysterious and unintelligible reasons, and so wrest the laws contrary to the meaning and intention of parliament;' or petitioning that the judges who showed such strong bias should no longer issue prohibitions, but, when questions arose concerning the limits and jurisdiction of the rival courts, indifferent persons should be pitched upon to judge them; or the lawyers, on the other hand, striking at the root of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction as if it were a transgression of the Statute of Praemunire1,—well, when we look at these things, we shall see that there Avere questions unsettled even before the Council of Trent, and hear opinions and 1 Wilkins, iii. 555 (1447) ; Parker's Antiquitates, 429.