As a set-off against these claims of the Crown upon the Church, the clergy also advanced certain claims. These touched the two important matters of taxation and jurisdiction. The Church claimed for her members that they should not be liable to pay the taxes raised by the secular authorities, nor should they have causes to which any ecclesiastic was a party tried in the secular courts. [Sidenote: Immunity from lay taxation.] In seeking freedom from lay taxation the Church did not ask that her members should escape their feudal obligations, nor even that they should contribute nothing to the exigencies of the State. The desire was merely that the clergy should be free from oppression and that the Church should be so far as possible self-governing. Thus Alexander III decreed in the third Lateran Council (1179), that for relieving the needs of the community, everything contributed by the Church to supplement the contributions of the laity should be given without compulsion on the recognition of its necessity or utility by the bishop and the clergy. Innocent III, in the fourth Lateran Council (1215), provided a further safeguard against lay impositions in demanding the permission of the Pope for any such levy. This does not mean that the clergy escaped taxation at the hands of the State; it merely means that while the Popes themselves heavily taxed them for purposes which it was often difficult to describe as religious, the price paid by the Crown for leave to tax the clergy was that a large portion of the money should find its way to Rome. [Sidenote: Tithes from the laity.]