III.  It was ordered that “no tenant-in-chief of the king, no officer of his household, or of his demesne, should be excommunicated, or his lands put under an interdict, until application had been made to the king, or in his absence to the grand justiciary, who ought to take care that what belongs to the king’s courts shall be there determined, and what belongs to the ecclesiastical courts shall be determined in them.”

Sentences of excommunication had been greatly multiplied and abused during the Middle Ages.  They were the principal weapons with which the clergy sought to protect themselves and their property from the cruelty and rapacity of the banditti in the service of the barons.  They were feared by the most powerful and unprincipled, because, at the same time that they excluded the culprit from the offices of religion, they also cut him off from the intercourse of society.  Men were compelled to avoid the company of the excommunicated, unless they were willing to participate in his punishment.  Hence much ingenuity was displayed in the discovery of expedients to restrain the exercise of this power; and it was contended that no tenant of the crown ought to be excommunicated without the king’s permission, because it deprived the sovereign of the personal services which he had a right to demand of his vassal.  This “custom” had been introduced by the Conqueror, and, though the clergy constantly reclaimed, had often been enforced by his successors.

IV.  The next was also a custom deriving its origin from the Conquest, that no archbishop, bishop, or dignified clergyman should lawfully go beyond the sea without the king’s permission.  Its object was to prevent complaints at the papal court, to the prejudice of the sovereign.

V. It was enacted that appeals should proceed regularly from the archdeacon to the bishop, and from the bishop to the archbishop.  If the archbishop failed to do justice, the cause ought to be carried before the king, that by his precept the suit might be terminated in the archbishop’s court, so as not to proceed further without the king’s consent.  Henry I had endeavored to prevent appeals from being carried before the Pope, and it was supposed that the same was the object of the present constitution.  The King, however, thought proper to deny it.  According to the explanation which he gave, it prohibited clergymen from appealing to the pope in civil causes only, when they might obtain justice in the royal courts.  The remaining articles are of minor importance.  They confine pleas of debt and disputes respecting advowsons to the cognizance of the king’s justices; declare that clergymen who hold lands of the crown hold by barony, and are bound to the same services as the lay barons; and forbid the bishops to admit to orders the sons of villeins, without the license of their respective lords.