England and Italy are habitually different – each from the other, each from the rest of Europe. This is conspicuously the case with respect to ecclesiastical legislation on clerical armsbearing. Beginning in the thirteenth century, Italian bishops carved out for themselves a distinctive sphere of reserved jurisdiction normally requiring, frequently in writing, their consent to exceptions from the customary prohibition on clerical armsbearing, even for travel. It was a model imitated nowhere else in Europe save in a few Iberian dioceses in the very late Middle Ages.

The course taken by the English was entirely different. Here the church seemed to cleave more faithfully to the ancient ban than did any other in Europe. It was not without significance that the last recorded instance in European history in which all the participants in a battle were obliged to do penance occurred in connection with Battle of Hastings. At this time ecclesiastical legislators everywhere were coming to focus on armsbearing by the clergy in particular, a narrowing which reflected both the reformers' intent to separate and reform the clergy and also the incipient reordering of jurisdiction that dominated so much of the formal political life of the High Middle Ages. In England the early collection of canons of Wulfstan, archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023, survives in two different forms.