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412
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
properties there must always have been at least an embryonic
chancery and archive which the trained king's clerks appointed
to bishoprics such as Leofric of Exeter and Giso of Wells
immediately before the Conquest may have considerably de/
veloped. Ordinarily, however, both household and chancery
must have been humble in scale. As for the judicial work, this
was accomplished, as has been seen, in the hundred court along
with secular business, and what record there was would have
been kept by the court's clerk. The Conquest brought the
elements of a secretariat and the institution of the episcopal
court, but for long all business was discharged by the bishop in
person or by the clerks of his household acting for him. Al/
though by the middle of the twelfth century the archive and
secretariat had developed, the clear view of an archbishop in
action that we derive from the letters and biographies of St.
Thomas show us an administration still largely personal and
unformalized. The clerks of Theobald and Thomas, who
counted in their number Vacarius, John of Salisbury, Herbert
of Bosham, and future bishops and curialists, were as distin/
guished and able as any that served a prelate in any age of the
Church, but their activities were largely individual and direct;
they were men of ability, young or mature, who had chosen or
had been chosen by the
archbishop, and they looked forward
to a career ofsimilar distinction. Though thefamilia of Canter/-
bury was in some ways exceptional since the monastic chapter
performed many ofthe duties ofthe see's regular officials, what
we know of Chichester and York at the same date shows the
same personal attachment of a group of clerks to the bishop.
The great change came in the decades on either side of the
Lateran Council: the development of canon law; wider
administrative duties; the appearance of a large class of pro/
fessional lawyers and secretaries; the disappearance of the in/
dependent literary man, half/scholar, half/churchman, of the
type of John of Salisbury and Peter of Blois all this brought
about a revolution comparable to the change from the hand/
written ledgers, letter/books, and personal accounting of the
family businesses ofthe early nineteenth century to the apparatus