[Sidenote: Royal Restrictions on the Church]
Gradually the national monarchs secured at least a partial control over
episcopal appointments, and in both England and France papal
jurisdiction was seriously restricted in other ways. In England the
power of the ecclesiastical courts had been reduced (1164); no property
might be bestowed upon the Church without royal permission (1279); the
pope might not make provision in England for his personal appointees to
office (1351); and appeals to Rome had been forbidden (1392).
[Footnote: All these anti-papal enactments were very poorly enforced.]
In France the clergy had been taxed early in the fourteenth century,
and the papacy, which had condemned such action, had been humiliated by
a forced temporary removal from Rome to Avignon, where it was
controlled by French rulers for nearly seventy years (1309-1377); and
in 1438 the French king, Charles VII, in a document, styled the
Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges, solemnly proclaimed the "liberties of
the Gallican Church," that a general council was superior to the pope,
that the pope might not interfere in episcopal elections, that he might
not levy taxes on French dioceses.
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