It is perhaps worthy of note that while the charters of Henry I. and Stephen spoke only of “holy church,” John speaks of the “English church.” This change suggests a growth of patriotism among the prelates, led by Stephen Langton. Footnote 340: Cf. _supra_, 117. Footnote 341: Cf. Pollock and Maitland, I. 74. “Freedom of the church” had thus come in 1136 to include “benefit of clergy” in a specially sweeping form, and much besides.[342] It is easy to understand why churchmen cherished an elastic phrase which, wide as were the privileges it already covered, might readily be stretched wider. Laymen, on the contrary, contended for a more restrictive meaning; and the Constitutions of Clarendon must be viewed primarily as an attempt to arrive at definite conclusions on disputed points of interpretation. Henry II. substantially held his ground, in spite of his nominal surrender after Becket’s murder. Thanks to his firmness, "the church’s freedom" shrank to more reasonable proportions, so that the well-known formula, when repeated by John, was emptied of much of the content found in it by Stephen’s bishops. If it still implied “benefit of clergy” that phrase was now read in a more restricted sense, while wardship over vacant sees was expressly reserved to the Crown by John. Chapter 18 of Magna Carta accepted, apparently with the approval of all classes, the principle that questions of church patronage (assizes of darrein presentment)[343] should be settled before the King’s Justices, a concession to the civil power inconsistent with the more extreme interpretations formerly put by churchmen on the phrase.[344] ----- Footnote 342: Cf. _supra_, 120–1. Footnote 343: For explanation see _infra_, c. 18. Footnote 344: On the other hand c. 22, which lays down special rules for the amercement of beneficed clerks, to that extent confirmed class privileges of the clergy. ----- In later reigns the pretensions of the church to privileged treatment were gradually reduced to narrow bounds, and the process of compression was facilitated by that very elasticity on which the clergy had relied as being favourable to the expansion of their claims. It was the civil government which benefited in the end from the vagueness of the words in which Magna Carta declared _quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit_.[345] ----- Footnote 345: