The lay patrons sometimes exercised the power of discharging the incumbent of his church and appointing another in his place. The church was not as now, the incumbent’s freehold property. He then held his position according to the will of the patron. We have sufficient evidence on this point. It is stated in the Acts of the Third Lateran Council of A.D. 1179-80, “So far has the boldness of laymen been carried, that they collate clerks to churches without institution from the bishops, _and remove them at their will_; and, besides this, they commonly dispose as they please of the possessions and goods of churches.” This council condemned “arbitrary consecrations,” as Selden calls them, of laymen. “Before the Council of Lateran (evidently the third), any man might give his tithes to what spiritual person he would.”[257] Four English bishops sat at this council. The Council gave the death-blow to arbitrary appropriations of tithes by laymen, without the consent of the bishop, to whatever church or monastery they pleased. It was ordained by this Council that no religious orders should receive any appropriations of churches or tithes without the assent of the bishop. In Anglo-Saxon times the tithes were given to the parish churches, but from A.D. 1066 to A.D. 1200, they were also given to monasteries, bishops, and capitular corporations. “Arbitrary consecrations of tithes,” says Blackstone, “were in general use till the time of King John, which was probably owing to the intrigues of the regular clergy or monks of the Benedictine and other rules, under Archbishop Dunstan and his successors, who endeavoured to wean the people from paying their dues to the secular or parochial clergy. A layman, who was obliged to pay his tithes somewhere, might think it good policy to erect an abbey, and there pay them to his own monks, or grant them to some abbey already erected, and thus have masses for ever sung for his soul.”[258] Not only had laymen appropriated tithes to episcopal, capitular, and monastic corporations, but, in Lord Selborne’s opinion, they may also have given them to parish churches. Hence, he thinks, _the true origin of the endowment of parish churches with tithes_. The decree of the Third Lateran Council, making void arbitrary appropriations of tithes, was at first opposed by the laymen of England, and so the practice continued. But the English hierarchy from that time opposed the practice, and by degrees it gradually ceased. Pope Innocent III., in a decretal epistle which he addressed to the Archbishop of Canterbury about A.D. 1200, owing to the continued arbitrary appropriation of tithes by laymen in face of the decrees of the Third Lateran Council, enjoined the payment of tithes to the parsons of the respective parishes. But the epistle had no binding force on the lay subjects of this kingdom.