It was no occasional, but an inveterate practice, and, apparently, common in the world, long before the system of feudalism gave it some justification by the connection of military service with the enjoyment of lands. Yet it has now so completely disappeared that--as a proof of the possible change of thought which may ultimately render a Christian soldier as great an anomaly as a fighting bishop--it is worth recalling from history some instances of so curious a custom. ‘The bishops themselves--not all, but many’--says a writer of King Stephen’s reign, ‘bound in iron, and completely furnished with arms, were accustomed to mount war-horses with the perverters of their country, to share in their spoil; to bind and torture the knights whom they took in the chance of war, or whom they met full of money.’[256] It was at the battle of Bouvines (1214) that the famous Bishop of Beauvais fought with a club instead of a sword, out of respect for the rule of the canon which forbade an ecclesiastic to shed blood. Matthew Paris tells the story how Richard I. took the said bishop prisoner, and when the Pope begged for his release as being his own son and a son of the Church, sent to Innocent III. the episcopal coat of mail, with the inquiry whether he recognised it as that of his son or of a son of the Church; to which the Pope had the wit to reply that he could not recognise it as belonging to either.[257] The story also bears repeating of the impatient knight who, sharing the command of a division at the battle of Falkirk with the Bishop of Durham, cried out to his slower colleague, before closing with the Scots, ‘It is not for you to teach us war; to your Mass, bishop!’ and therewith rushed with his followers into the fray (1298).[258] It is, however, needless to multiply instances, which, if Du Cange may be credited, became more common during the devastation of France by the Danes in the ninth century, when all the military aid that was available became a matter of national existence. That event rendered Charlemagne’s capitulary a dead letter, by which that monarch had forbidden any ecclesiastic to march against an enemy, save two or three bishops to bless the army or reconcile the combatants, and a few priests to give absolution and celebrate the Mass.[259] It appears that this law was made in response to an exhortation by Pope Adrian II., similar to one addressed in the previous century by Pope Zachary to Charlemagne’s ancestor, King Pepin. But though military service and the tenure of ecclesiastical benefices became more common from the time of the Danish irruptions, instances are recorded of abbots and archbishops who chose rather to surrender their temporalities than to take part in active service; and for many centuries the whole question seems to have rested on a most uncertain footing, law and custom demanding as a duty that which public and ecclesiastical opinion condoned, but which the Church herself condemned.