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RELIGIOUS LIFE AND ORGANIZATION 425
1365, 1393) outlaw and confiscation were made possible
penalties for those who secured papal privileges against the
royal rights or appealed to papal courts in matters where the
royal courts claimed jurisdiction. This last statute, however,
though it was to have a redoubtable future, was severely
limited in its
original aim and was rarely invoked in practice.
At the moment of its third enactment the opposition in some
quarters to papal government had become much more theo'
logical and drastic, but the promoters of these views were re/
garded as heretical and the enemies ofgovernment in Church
and State alike.
Another feature of medieval church life, not wholly un/
connected with the proprietary church on the one hand and
with papal centralization on the other, was pluralism, or the
simultaneous occupation of more than one lucrative benefice
or dignity. Never wholly unknown in a well/endowed church
in any age, the evidence of Domesday and the familiar case
of Stigand show that it was present in a mild degree before
the Conquest, but the relatively modest endowments of the
Church at that date, and the almost total absence of any lucra/
tive office or prebend save that of a cure of souls, prevented
it from becoming a common abuse. The rich endowments
following upon the redistribution ofland at the Conquest, the
enduring piety of the age, and the great increase in the wealth
of the country, together with a host of other causes the
growth of a large
clerical staff at court and in the law courts
and bishops* households, the new learning and its expenses,
the multiplication of clerks with a consequent plethora of
potential vicars and locum tenentes all this led to a rapid in/
crease in pluralism and an ever/sharper division between the
clerical proletariat and the highly born or highly gifted careerist.
As early as the middle ofthe twelfth century Thomas Becket,
while archdeacon of Canterbury, amassed a rich and miscel/
laneous bundle of benefices and posts. It had been an axiom
ofancient discipline that a priest was the priest ofa single flock
under the bishop, and the Lateran Council of 1179, followed
by its successor of 1215, reiterated the familiar principle that