345 DIGEST AND DECRETUM. [XIII. doing, and instituted a nearer official of greater authority and more direct responsibility. John of Salisbury, the philosopher and historian, was, as secretary to Archbishop Theobald, the ancestor of the diocesan chancellors, officials and vicar-generals, who begin to execute with more regularity and intelligence the law of the Church. Henry of Blois when legate had, as we are told, greatly encouraged the practice of appeals; and an immense proportion of John of Salisbury's letters, written in the name of Theobald, are concerned with questions of appeal, on the rights of advowsons, and other branches of clerical discipline. But that was not all. In the year 1149 Theobald brought from Lombardy and settled at Oxford as a teacher Master Vacarius, who had given himself to the study of the Code and Digest, and drawn up handbooks of procedure sufficient to settle all the quarrels of the law schools. Stephen, the reigning king, set himself stedfastly against this new teaching and expelled Vacarius ; he had on his side the unintelligent dislike of foreign manners, the prudent conservatism of the elder prelates, and the personal jealousies of his brother Henry, whose opponent in political matters Theobald was. Accordingly the civil law was for the time banished. In the year 1151 Gratian completed the Decretum, the concordance of the canon laws ; and they shortly found their way to England, where however they were scarcely more warmly received than the civil laws had been, but were not directly banished. It is curious that both Prynne and Selden, not to mention Coke, have confounded the teaching of Vacarius with the attempt to introduce canon law. It is certain that what Vacarius taught was the Corpus Juris of Justinian; but the two systems are thus closely joined together both in time and in essential character. And from this time dates in England that extremely close connexion between the two systems which is recognised in the