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Becket until Nikon, the Patriarch of Moscow, challengedthe drastic curtailment of ecclesiastical jurisdiction andproperty rights sanctioned by the assembly of the landin 1649. Nikon partially succeeded, but the triumph ofthe secular courts was completed by Peter the Great.Church jurisdiction had become from the fourteenthcentury onwards more and more important as a sourceof revenue in proportion as charters of privilege extendedits scope. The monasteries and the episcopate in theircapacity as great landowners acquired special, thoughvarying, rights of jurisdiction over their tenants andpeasants, as well as privileges in regard to taxation, trade,and service. Thus, when in the seventeenth centuryserfdom became generally established, they owned serrsin the same way as lay landowners, and had even widerpowers over them. In this development the Russianchurch was not dissimilar to the Western church in theMiddle Ages, but it was markedly different, at any ratefrom the medieval church in England and France, inthat a large part of its administrative, judicial, andeconomic functions came to be exercised by laymenacting in its name, a fact which, while it mitigated therivalry of church and state, also assisted the secularizationof its courts and lands, to be mentioned later.Byzantium brought to Russia five gifts: her religion,her law, her view of the world, her art and writing. TheCyrillic script commemorates the alphabet invented onthe basis of the Greek in the ninth century by Cyril, thebrother of Methodius. From the Bulgars, whose languagewas closely similar to that of the Russians, it was transplantedunder Vladimir. Known as Church Slavonic,it was the written language until popular speech, governmentalrequirements, and the extension of writing tothe laity gradually brought into being a written Russian(with the same script) more and more divergent fromChurch Slavonic, which continued always to be thelanguage used in church services. As late as theseventeenth century written Russian was still to a largeextent under Church Slavonic influence; by the nextcentury it had ceased to be.What was written in Kiev Russia was overwhelmingly178