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RELIGIOUS LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 423
for under Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II, was demanded
and secured by Langton in Magna Carta, and for several
decades was respected by both pope and king. Disputes, how
ever, factious and genuine, abounded at election time, and if
taken to Rome the smallest irregularity in carrying out the
somewhat stringent canonical precautions gave the pope the
right to quash the election and appoint; there was also oppor/
tunity when a bishop was translated or died in the Curia or
(like Kilwardby) was recalled to be cardinal. Nevertheless,
the canonical forms of election, often influenced by the king,
were still honoured, though papal reservation of individual
cases continued. Finally, in 1363, Urban V reserved to him/
self all
episcopal sees however vacated. Consequently, from
1349 until the Reformation, with the insignificant exception
of a few months in 1416-17, every appointment to a
bishopric
in England and Wales was made by papal provision, though
this was normally preceded by a canonical election by the
chapter acting on what was in effect a royal mandate. Three
methods of appointment were thus, so to
say, concurrent or
conflated, and while all
agree that the canonical electors had
little to say in the choice, historians have not been in complete
agreement as to the relative shares of the two major parties in
the result. Undoubtedly political considerations kept the pope
from appointing any clerk outside a narrow class ofthose dis/
tinguished either by high birth or close connexion with the
king's circle of officials, and hence some kind of royal favour
was a paramount consideration; on the other hand, the need
for papal confirmation was probably one of the causes that
kept the English episcopate respectable, and there were several
cases where, oftwo eligible government officials, the king pro/
posed one and the pope provided the other. Moreover, the
papal right to translate, and to fill the see thus left vacant of his
own initiative, was not in dispute and was in fact untouched
by English legislation, though here again the frequent trans/
lations ofthe fifteenth century were often moves in the political
game. Speaking broadly, it may be said that episcopal ap/
pointment was achieved by a collusive process in which the