[Sidenote: Council of Clarendon, 1164. ] [Sidenote: Constitutions of Clarendon. ] [Sidenote: Becket’s conduct. ] Soon after Christmas another court was held, at Clarendon, one of those forest palaces at which, as at Woodstock, Henry and his sons used to call the counsellors together, and diversify business with sport. It was called for the purpose of finishing the business began at Westminster. The archbishop was asked whether he would accept the ancient customs; he declined to do it without making conditions. The king then ordered that the ‘recognition of the customs’ should be read. This was the report of the great committee appointed to ascertain and commit them to writing, a committee which nominally contained nearly all the bishops and barons, but which Becket declared to consist only of Richard de Lucy, the justiciar, and Jocelin de Bailleul, a French lawyer. This report was the celebrated Constitutions of Clarendon, a sort of code or concordat, in sixteen chapters, which included not merely a system of definite rules to regulate the disposal of the criminal clergy, but a method of proceeding by which all quarrels that arose between the clergy and laity might be satisfactorily heard and determined. Questions of advowsons, of disputed estates, of excommunication, the rights of the spiritual courts over laymen, and of lay courts over spiritual men, the rights of the crown in vacant churches and in the nomination to benefices, and the right of appeal in ecclesiastical causes, were all defined. No one was to carry a suit farther than the archiepiscopal court; that is, no one was to appeal to the Pope without the king’s leave. Prelates and parsons were not to quit the kingdom without license. The sons of rustics or villeins were not to be ordained without leave of the lords on whose lands they were born. Many similar customs were recorded which show that Henry had determined to set the jurisprudence of the kingdom, as touching laymen and clergy alike, on a just and equal basis; no unfairness towards the spiritual estate was intended, but simply the extinction or restriction of the immunities, the existence of which threw the whole system into disorder. An appeal to Rome must not be allowed to paralyze the whole ecclesiastical jurisdiction, any more than an assertion that the murderer or the murdered man--for the immunity told both ways--was a clerk, should be allowed to insure the escape and impunity of the murderer. Becket was perhaps, at the first sight of these Constitutions, inclined or, as he would have said, tempted to yield. He accepted the Constitutions. Almost as soon as he had done so he drew back; either he recalled his concession or refused to set his seal to the acceptance, or in some way recanted. We have no entirely trustworthy evidence; but it would seem he declared that he had sinned, that he would go to Rome, that he would resign his see, that he would