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420 MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
spotia, a death duty on the property ofbishops and clerics dying
in the Curia. Although the total sums involved were small if
with the burden of taxation in the late Roman and
compared
Byzantine empires or the modern world, their impact was con/
siderable, coinciding as it did with stringent royal demands,
and beyond the actual financial sacrifice there was a not un^
justified fear of what might come next from a papacy that
advanced with relentless logic from tax to tax, progressing
steadily in financial efficiency, and using for its purposes the
spiritual sanctions of excommunication and suspension. Feel/*
ings of grievance were aggravated in the fourteenth century
by the knowledge that wealth was passing out of England
into hands that were now regarded as bound in sympathy with
the national foe. To judge, however, by contemporary com^
came in its most forcible form not so much
ments, protest
from the
clergy as from the king and his officials, who felt
that others were profiting from the taxes. In the sequel, what
with subsidies voted for the king by the command of the pope
and a handsome 'rake/ofF on the papal taxes themselves,
the government derived more profit from papal taxation
than did the Curia, but the economic pressure here, as among
the centralized orders, was one ofthe principal psychological
forces that broke down the existing conception of a united
Latin Christendom.
Concurrently with the development of papal taxation, and
in part arising from the same causes, was the practice of papal
intervention in the bestowal of benefices known as papal pro/
vision. This affected in different ways two different classes: the
so-called major benefices or bishoprics; and the minor bene^
fices ranging from official dignities such as deaneries, provost'
ships, and treasurerships to rectories, canonries, prebends, and
small offices. As regards bishoprics, direct papal appointment
as a general practice was slow in coining. It had, indeed, been
maintained from ancient times by the Apostolic See that as
diocesan bishops were ecclesiastical brethren of the pope and
owed allegiance to none save the Prince of the Apostles, a pope
could on occasion appoint or depose a bishop. Nevertheless,