he thought badly of Tribonian also, and would have been the last man to preach a Reception. Professor Alberigo Gentili of Oxford, he too was protestant enough and could rail at the canonists by the hour; but then he as an Italian had a bitter feud with the French humanizers, and stood up for the medieval gloss[30]. Plainly the story is not simple and we must hurry past it. Still the perplexity of detail should not obscure the broad truth that there was pleasant reading in the Byzantine Code for a king who wished to be monarch in church as well as state: pleasanter reading than could be found in our ancient English law-books. Surely Erastianism is a bad name for the theory that King Henry approved: Marsilianism seems better, but Byzantinism seems best[31]. A time had come when, medieval spectacles being discarded, men could see with the naked eye what stood in the Code and Novels of Constantinople. In 1558 on the eve of an explosive Reformation ‘the Protestants of Scotland,’ craving ‘remedy against the tyranny of the estate ecclesiastical,’ demanded that the controversy should be judged by the New Testament, the ancient fathers ‘and the godly approved laws of Justinian the emperor[32].’ University-bred jurists, even such as came from an oldish school, were very serviceable to King Henry in the days of the great divorce case and the subsequent quarrel with the papacy. Tunstall, Gardiner, Bonner, Sampson and Clerk, to say nothing of the Leghs and Laytons, were doctors of law and took their fees in bishoprics and deaneries[33]. Certainly they were more conspicuous and probably they were much abler men than those who were sitting in the courts of the common law. With the one exception of Anthony Fitzherbert, the judges of Henry’s reign are not prominent in our legal history, and we have little reason for attributing deep knowledge of any sort of law to such chancellors as Audley, Wriothesley and Rich. I doubt our common lawyers easily accommodated themselves to ecclesiastical changes. Some years after Elizabeth’s accession the number of barristers who were known to the government as ‘papists’ was surprisingly large and it included the great Plowden[34]. But we must go back to our main theme.