It kept prisons and passed sentence (virtually if not nominally) of death; it treated with other governments as one power with another; it took principalities and kingdoms in fief.
It was supported by involuntary contributions.[6] The expanding world had burst the bands of the old church.

It needed a new spiritual frame, and this frame was largely supplied by the Reformation.

Prior to that revolution there had been several distinct efforts to transcend or to revolt from the limitations imposed by the Catholic faith; this was done by the mystics, by the pre-reformers, by the patriots and by the humanists.
[1] A ducat was worth intrinsically $2.25, or nine shillings, at a time when money had a much greater purchasing power than it now has.
[2] The grossus, English groat, German Groschen, was a coin which varied considerably in value.

It may here be taken as intrinsically worth about 8 cents or four pence, at a time when money had many times the purchasing power that it now has.
[3] A spiritual relationship was established if a man and woman were sponsors to the same child at baptism.
[4] Presumably of affinity, i.e., a wife's sister, but there is nothing to show that this law did not also apply to consanguinity, and at one time the pope proposed that the natural son of Henry VIII, the Duke of Richmond, should marry his half sister, Mary.
[5] "Nota diligenter, quod huiusmodi gratiae et dispensationes non conceduntur pauperibus." _Taxa cancellariae apostolicae_, in E.
Friedberg: _Lerbuch des katholischen und evangelischen Kirchenrechts_, 1903, pp.

389 ff.
[6] Maitland: _Canon Law in the Church of England_, p.