The bishop was always at a disadvantage in these
appeal cases; he stood to lose everything, and he stood to win
nothing at all except the satisfaction of his conscience that he was
struggling for principle and right. And thus it came to pass that the
monks enjoyed this kind of warfare, and rarely shrank from engaging
in it. Indeed, an appeal to Rome meant sending a deputation from the
convent to watch the case as it was going on, and there was all the
delight of a foreign tour an a sight of the world--a trip, in fact,
to the Continent at the expense of the establishment.
But when there was no appeal case going on--and an appeal was too
expensive an amusement to be indulged in often--there was always a
good deal of exciting litigation to keep up the interest of the
convent, and to give them something to think about and gossip about
nearer home. We have the best authority--the authority of the great
Pope Innocent III.--for believing that Englishmen in the thirteenth
century were extremely fond of beer; but there was something else
that they were even fonder of, and that was law. Monastic history is
almost made up of the stories of this everlasting litigation; nothing
was too trifling to be made into an occasion for a lawsuit. Some
neighbouring landowner had committed a trespass or withheld a tithe
pig. Some audacious townsman had claimed the right of catching eels
in a pond.
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