Needless to say, all the provisions and concessions outlined in the previous chapter were carefully restricted in ways which could be spelled out in academic treatises and judicial decisions, but not so easily in the decrees of provincial councils and diocesan synods. How were they to be interpreted as living law for the ordinary clergy? Before proceeding to those texts, we will do well to note that legislation which allowed such considerable room for argument, perplexity, and abuse could be interpreted in ways both unconscious and undocumented. Let two examples suffice. First, although popes and canonists held through the High Middle Ages that regalian bishops might lead their troops and direct them in operations, these bishops were not to exhort the soldiers to kill, nor were they to fight themselves. But how exactly were these pious exhortations to be reconciled with the principle, explicitly conceded again and again from Alexander III onward, of the right of every cleric to defend himself against attackers, a principle extended even further by the Clementine text Si furiosus? Although I have never encountered in writing an example of a canonist linking the separate canonical possibilities of a cleric's presence at a battle and of his right to self-defense, it is entirely reasonable to suppose that such advice was given at least orally, especially to bishops and others who wanted to hear this kind of advice and were served by canonists who knew what their lords wanted to hear.