The ecclesiastics in that age had renounced all immediate subordination to the magistrate: they openly pretended to an exemptior, in criminal accusations, from a trial before courts of justice; and were gradually introducing a like exemption in civil causes: spiritual penalties alone could be inflicted on their offences; and as the clergy had extremely multiplied in England, and many of them were consequently of very low characters, crimes of the deepest dye--murders, robberies, adulteries, rapes--were daily committed with impunity by the ecclesiastics. It had been found, for instance, on inquiry, that no less than a hundred murders had, since the king’s accession, been perpetrated by men of that profession, who had never been called to account for these offences; and holy orders were become a full protection for all enormities. A clerk in Worcestershire, having debauched a gentleman’s daughter, had, at this time, proceeded to murder the father; and the general indignation against this crime moved the king to attempt the remedy of an abuse which was become so palpable, and to require that the clerk should be delivered up, and receive condign punishment from the magistrate. Becket insisted on the privileges of the church; confined the criminal in the bishop’s prison, lest he should be seized by the king’s officers; maintained that no greater punishment could be inflicted on him than degradation; and when the king demanded that, immediately after he was degraded, he should be tried by the civil power, the primate asserted that it was iniquitous to try a man twice upon the same accusation, and for the same offence.