In the Church as in the State the royal power was unquestioned. A papal legate arrived in October, who proved a tractable servant of the king; "with the right hand and the left he took gifts, which he planted together in his coffers". His coming gave Henry opportunity to carry out at last through common action of Church and State his old scheme of reforms. In the Assize of Northampton, held in January 1176, the king confirmed and perfected the judicial legislation which he had begun ten years before in the Assize of Clarendon. The kingdom was divided into six circuits. The judges appointed to the circuits were given a more full independence than they had before, and were no longer joined with the sheriffs of the counties in their sessions, their powers were extended beyond criminal jurisdiction to questions of property, of inheritance, of wardship, of forfeiture of crown lands, of advowsons to churches, and of the tenure of land. For the first time the name of Justitiarii Itinerantes was given in the Pipe Roll to these travelling justices, and the anxiety of the king to make the procedure of his courts perfectly regular, instead of depending on oral tradition, was shown by the law books which his ministers began at this time to draw up. As a security against rebellion, a new oath of fealty was required from every man, whether earl or villein, fugitives and outlaws were to be more sharply sought after, and felons punished with harsher cruelty. "Thinking more of the king than of his sheep," the legate admitted Henry's right to bring the clergy before secular courts for crimes against forest law, and in various questions of lay fiefs; and agreed that murderers of clerks, who till then had been dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts, should bear the same punishment as murderers of laymen, and should be disinherited. Religious churchmen looked on with helpless irritation at Henry's first formal victory over the principles of Thomas; in the view of his own day he had "renewed the Assize of Clarendon, and ordered to be observed the execrable decrees for which the blessed martyr Thomas had borne exile for seven years, and been crowned with the crown of martyrdom."