Distributed Digital Property Board

[aleajactaest]

By the way, re Church corruption as the impetus for change:

Maybe so, but there was another battle which was equally important: between the Church and the State.

The basic underlying issue concerned the rights of ownership over land. As you probably know, the Church and the Crown were the largest landowners in the Middle Ages. Land was the source of wealth and power, and who controlled it was important. Not only because income is useful. But also because bishops served two masters: the monarch and the Pope. Who did the bishops owe their allegiance to?

The friction shows itself in events like the murder of Thomas Becket, in changes to ecclesiastical processes like the investiture of bishops, in confrontations such as that between the Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII, with the development of new systems of belief, such as Lutheran and Anglican Protestantism and finally with entirely new ways of corralling Church power, such as the English system of putting its bishops in the House of Lords.

The popular movements were stinted by a lack of power early on. But the church-state dispute was titanic from quite an early stage.