They represented, among many other grievances, that the benefices of the Italian clergy in England had been estimated, and were found to amount to sixty thousand marks[*] a year, a sum which exceeded the annual revenue of the crown itself.[**] They obtained only an evasive answer from the pope; but as mention had been made, before the council, of the feudal subjection of England to the see of Rome, the English agents, at whose head was Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, exclaimed against the pretension, and insisted that King John had no right, without the consent of his barons, to subject the kingdom to so ignominious a servitude.[***] The popes, indeed, afraid of carrying matters too far against England, seem thenceforth to have little insisted on that pretension.
This check, received at the council of Lyons, was not able to stop the court of Rome in its rapacity: Innocent exacted the revenues of all vacant benefices, the twentieth of all ecclesiastical revenues without exception; the third of such as were exceeded a hundred marks a year; the half of such as were possessed by non-residents.[****] He claimed the goods of all intestate clergymen;[*****] he pretended a title to inherit all money gotten by usury: he levied benevolences upon the people; and when the king, contrary to his usual practice, prohibited these exactions, he threatened to pronounce against him the same censures which he had emitted against the emperor Frederic.[******] * Innocent's bull in Rymer, vol.i.p.

471, says only fifty thousand marks a year.
** M.Paris, p.451.The customs were part of Henry's revenue, and amounted to six thousand pounds a year: they were at first email sums paid by the merchants for the use of the king's ware-houses, measures, weights, etc.

See Gilbert's History of the Exch p.

214.
*** M.Paris, p.

460.
**** M.Paris, p.480.Ann.Burt.p.