In founding ecclesiastical benefices, kings and nobles had reserved to themselves the right of appointing to them; none could possess them until after they had been invested by the donor or his heirs. It was a simple application of the feudal system to ecclesiastical domains; but the Court of Rome complained of the bad selection to which this system led, and especially of the bargains which were driven between the patrons and the candidates. A vast number of benefices were disposed of no doubt: but this traffic has subsisted under every regime; the question never has been other than that of knowing for whose benefit it should be earned on. Hildebrand armed himself with a sanctified zeal against this abuse: to extinquish it, he ventured to dictate for Nicholas II. a decree, which prohibited the acceptance of a benefice from a layman, even gratuitously.¹⁴⁶ This decree, published in 1059, in the same council which confined to the cardinals the election of the popes, presented itself under the form of a special rule against simony. Little attention was at first given to it, it was rarely carried into effect; but we are bound to point it out here as the prelude to the quarrels about investitures. ¹⁴⁶ Baronins. Ann. ecclea. ad. ann. 1069, 5,32,34. For a long period, kings and nobles had invested prelates in presenting them with a switch or branch, as is practised in the investiture of counts and knights. But the clergy, from the tenth century, had more than once thought to deprive the patrons of benefices of their privileges, by proceeding without delay to the election and consecration of the prelate. It seemed allowed on all sides, that the consecration rendered the election irrevocable: and if the patron layman had been advertised of neither one nor the other, he lost the opportunity of bestowing or selling the dignity. To escape this stratagem, the sovereigns decreed that, immediately after the death of a prelate, the ring and crozier should be transferred to his successor only in investing him. Adam de Breme¹⁴⁷ refers to the reign of Louis le Débonnaire this form of investiture: but it is infinitely more probable, that it was not introduced until under Otho the Great, after the middle of the tenth century: it was almost universally established in the eleventh.¹⁴⁸ Hildebrand promised to himself its abolition, firstly, because it secured to laymen the right of nomination or of sale, and further, as it caused two symbols of the ecclesiastical power to pass through the hands of the profane. ¹⁴⁷ Hist, eccles. 1.1. n. 2. ¹⁴⁸ Humbert 1.3. contra Simonaicus c. 7 et 11.