Consequently the mediaeval church claimed that it had jurisdiction over all marriage, and over all divorce; and also took jurisdiction over a man's children at his death, and over his property, now exercised by our courts of probate. This they got out of the notion that when a man was dead, there was something, in a sense, that went beyond this life in looking after his property and children. And down until twenty or thirty years ago all jurisdiction in England in matters which concerned a man's property, after death, belonged to the church courts and their successors. The church law was based on the Roman law, but was called canon law, the technical word, because it is the "canons" of the church. It is a convenient term to distinguish it from the ordinary civil law of the Continent. So that the Constitutions of Clarendon began what was completed only under Henry VIII; they very clearly asserted the claim of the king to be supreme over the Church of England. The Bishop of Rome, as Henry VIII called the pope, had no more power than any other foreign bishop.[2] There still remained the institution known as benefit of clergy, by which any priest, or later any clerk or cleric (which word came to mean any one who could read and write) could get off of any criminal accusation, at first even murder, by simply pleading his clergy; in which case the worst that could happen to him was that he was branded in the right hand. But the Constitutions of Clarendon were a great step toward civil liberty. Taken by us in 1164, it was followed in so neighboring a country as France only so late as a few years ago. The priests, however, still managed to retain their jurisdiction over offences among themselves, as well as over marriage, the relation between the sexes, slander, usury, and wills—of matters relating to the sacraments, and of sins.