William the Conqueror and Lanfranc recognizing that the Church, strong and well ordered, made for national well-being, had set up ecclesiastical courts wherein all matters affecting church law and discipline were to be dealt with by the clergy, to the end that the clergy should not be mixed up in lawsuits and should be excluded from the lay courts. Henry II. was not satisfied that criminous clerks were adequately dealt with in these ecclesiastical courts, where no penalty involving bloodshed might be inflicted, and where the savage punishments of mutilation had no place. Thomas was as anxious as the king for the Church to be purged of abuses, but he was resolved not to hand over offenders to the secular arm. The archbishop was an ardent reformer. “He plucked up, pulled down, scattered and rooted out whatever he found amiss in the vineyard of the Lord,” wrote a contemporary; but he would shelter his flock as far as he could by the canon law from the hideous cruelties of the King’s Courts.[13] It was not for the protection of the clergy alone the archbishop was fighting in the councils summoned by the king at Westminster in 1163, and at Clarendon in 1164. “Ecclesiastical privileges were not so exclusively priestly privileges as we sometimes fancy. They sheltered not only ordained ministers, but all ecclesiastical officers of every kind; the Church Courts also claimed jurisdiction in the causes of widows and orphans. In short, the privileges for which Thomas contended transferred a large part of the people, and that the most helpless part, from the bloody grasp of the King’s Courts to the milder jurisdiction of the bishop.” (Freeman, _Historical Essay_, First Series.) Before the climax of the dispute between Henry and Thomas was reached at Clarendon, the archbishop had resisted the king in a matter of arbitrary taxation--“the earliest recorded instance of resistance to the royal will in a matter of taxation”[14]--and had fallen still further in the king’s disfavour. Henry was at Woodstock, on July 1st, 1163, with the archbishop and the great men of the land, and among other matters a question was raised concerning the payment of a two shillings land tax on every hide of land. This was an old tax dating from Saxon times, which William the Conqueror had increased. It was paid to the sheriffs, who in return undertook the defence of the county, and may be compared with the county rates of our own day. The king declared this tax should in future be collected for the crown, and added to the royal revenue; and no one dared to question this decision until Archbishop Thomas arose and told the king to his face that the tax was not to be exacted as revenue, but was a voluntary offering to be paid to the sheriffs only “so long as they shall serve us fitly and maintain and defend our dependants.” It was not a tax that could be enforced by law.