It is here that we find the real meaning of the second great political principle of the Middle Ages, that is the supremacy of law; that it is the law which is the supreme authority in the State, the law which is over every person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary of Thomas a Becket, wishes to distinguish between the prince and the tyrant, he insists that the prince is one who rules according to law, while the tyrant is one who ignores and violates the law.[26] And in a memorable phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter part of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically that the king has two superiors, God and the law.[27] There is an absurd notion still current among more ignorant persons--I have even heard some theologians fall into the mistake--that men in the Middle Ages thought of authority as something arbitrary and unintelligible, while the truth is that such a conception was wholly foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite true that the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not because the men of those days did not understand the meaning of law and of freedom, but because they were only slowly working out the organization through which these can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval state was the law, and it was supreme because it was taken by them to be the embodiment of justice. It is again out of this principle that there arose another great conception which is still often thought to be modern, but which is really mediaeval, the conception that the authority of the ruler rests upon and is conditioned by an agreement or contract between him and the people. For this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was based upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation ceremony, the oath of the king to maintain the law, and to administer justice, and the oath of the people to serve and obey the king whom they had recognized or elected. The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal service, but only on the condition that he holds inviolable his oath. The ruler who breaks this is a tyrant, and for him there was no place in mediaeval political theory. This conception was expressed in very plain and even crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he said that the king was in the same relation to the community as the man who is hired to keep the pigs to his master. If the swineherd fails to do his work the master turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his power he must be deposed.[28] John of Salisbury in the twelfth century expressed this in even stronger terms when he said that if the prince became a tyrant and violated the laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if there were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any citizen to slay him.[29]