independent. Hardly less important than the settlement of this matter was the establishment of the legislative independence of the Church. From the two legatine councils of 1070, at Winchester and Windsor, a series begins of great national synods, meeting at intervals to the end of the reign. Complete divorce from the State was not at first possible. The council was held at a meeting of the court, and was summoned by the king. He was present at the sessions, as were also lay magnates of the realm, but the questions proper to the council were discussed and decided by the churchmen alone, and were promulgated by the Church as its own laws. This was real legislative independence, even if the form of it was somewhat defective, and before very long, as the result of this beginning, the form came to correspond to the reality, and the process became as independent as the conclusion. William's famous ordinance separating the spiritual and temporal courts decreed another extensive change necessary to complete the independence of the Church in its legal interests. The date of this edict is not certain, but it would seem from such evidence as we have to have been issued not very long after the meeting of the councils of 1070. It withdrew from the local popular courts, the courts of the hundred, all future enforcement of the ecclesiastical laws, subjected all offenders against these laws to trial in the bishop's court, and promised the support of the temporal authorities to the processes and decisions of the Church courts. This abolishing by edict of so important a prerogative of the old local courts, and annulling of so large a part of the old law, was the most violent and serious innovation made by the Conqueror in the Saxon judicial system; but it was fully justified, not merely by the more highly developed law which came into use as a result of the change, but by the necessity of a stricter enforcement of that law than would ever be possible through popular courts.