It is probable that the knights and representatives of the hundreds and townships grumbled continually at the trouble and expense to which the King’s legislation put them; for neither they nor Henry II himself would realize that they were receiving a splendid education in the A B C of self-government that must be the foundation of any true democracy. Yet a few generations later, when Henry’s weak grandson and namesake Henry III misruled England, the Knights of the Shire were already accepted as men of public experience, and their representatives summoned to a parliament to defend the liberties of England. Henry II used popular institutions and crown officials as levers against the independence of his baronage, but the chief struggle of his reign in England was not with the barons so much as with the Church. Thomas Becket as Chancellor had been Henry’s right hand in attacking feudal privileges: he had warned his master that as a leading Churchman his love might turn to hate, his help to opposition. The King refused to believe him, thrust the burden of the archbishopric of Canterbury on his unwilling shoulders, and then found to his surprise and rage that he had secured the election of a very Hildebrand, who held so high a conception of the dignity of the Church that it clashed with royal demands at every turn. [Sidenote: The Becket Controversy] One of the chief subjects of dispute was the claim of the Church to reserve for her jurisdiction all cases that affected ‘clerks’, that is, not only priests, but men employed in the service of the Church, such as acolytes or choristers. The King insisted that clerks convicted in ecclesiastical courts of serious crimes should be handed over to the royal courts for secular punishment. His argument was that if a clerk had committed a murder the ecclesiastical judge was not allowed by Canon law to deliver a death-sentence, and so could do no more than ‘unfrock’ the guilty man and fine or imprison him. Thus a clerk could live to commit two murders where a layman would by command of the royal judges be hung at the first offence. Becket, on his side, would not swerve from his opinion that it was sacrilege for royal officials to lay hands on a priest or clerk whether ‘criminous’ or not; and when Henry embodied his suggestions of royal supremacy in a decree called the Constitutions of Clarendon, the Archbishop publicly refused to sign his agreement to them. Threats and insults were heaped upon him by angry courtiers, and one of his attendants, terrified by the scene, exclaimed, ‘Oh, my master, this is a fearful day!’ ‘The Day of Judgement will be yet more fearful,’ answered the undaunted Becket, and in the face of his fearlessness no one at the moment dared to lay hands on him.