The duties of a bishop as the officer of a state, and contradistinguished from his merely ecclesiastical functions, were to assist in the administration of justice between man and man, to guard against perjury, and to superintend the administration of the ordeals; further to take care that no fraud was committed by means of unjust measures, to which end he was made the guardian of the standards, and the judge of what work might be demanded from the serf; above all, to watch over the maintenance of the peace, and the upholding of divine as well as secular law[883]. The canons of the church did indeed prohibit the presence of bishops on trials which might involve the penalties of death or mutilation; and even the Constitutions of Clarendon, the object of which was to place the clergy on their proper and ancient footing towards the other members of the church and state, recognised this exemption[884]: but there is little reason to suppose that it was regarded by the Anglosaxons; indeed the popular courts had no power to pass sentences of so deep a dye, until long after the custom of the bishop’s presence therein had been established too firmly to be questioned. It was otherwise among the Franks, and we may perhaps attribute this to the strong nationality of the Frankish clergy, which indisposed them to claim their canonical immunity. ----- Footnote 883: The ‘Institutes of Ecclesiastical Polity’ are very explicit upon these points. They say:—“To a bishop belongs every direction, both in divine and worldly things. He shall, in the first place, inform men in orders, so that each of them may know what it properly behoves him to do, and also what they have to enjoin to secular men. He shall ever be [busied] about reconciliation and peace, as he best may. He shall zealously appease strifes and effect peace, with those temporal judges who love right. He shall in accusations direct the _lád_, so that no man may wrong another, either in oath or ordeal. He shall not consent to any injustice, or wrong measure, or false weight; but it is fitting that every legal right (both ‘burhriht’ and ‘landriht’) go by his counsel and with his witness: and let every burgmeasure, and every balance for weighing be, by his direction and furthering, very exact; lest any man should wrong another, and thereby altogether too greatly sin.... It behoves all Christian men to love righteousness, and shun unrighteousness; and especially men in orders should ever exalt righteousness, and suppress unrighteousness: therefore should bishops, together with temporal judges, so direct judgments, that, as far as in them lies, they never permit any injustice to spring up there.... By the confessor’s direction, and by his own measure, it is justly fitting that the thralls work for their lords over all the district in which he shrives. And it is right that there be not one measuring-rod