The last quarter of the twelfth century and the first decade of the thirteenth, or, to speak more accurately, the period between the death of Alexander III in 1181 and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, was a time of considerable disorder in the life of the Church in western Europe. Under a succession of short-lived and undistinguished popes the apostolic see lost the power of initiative and direction at the very moment when the great spiritual revival of the first half of the century was exhausted, while the intellectual renaissance, theological, legal and secular, was finding foci of growing importance at a number of widely separated points which were to become the medieval universities; at the same time the movement towards corporate, autonomous life, in the centres both of learning and of commerce, was developing very rapidly, and affecting the outlook of all groups and associations. There were, in fact, within the framework of the Church and nation, strong centrifugal forces drawing away from the central government towards lesser and more communal forms of control and association.

In England, this disorganization in the ecclesiastical sphere was increased by the trend taken by national events. The autocratic, strongly national government of Henry II had to a large extent withdrawn England in practice, though not in theory, from the control of the Curia and canon law; the group of curial, canonist bishops of the middle of the century had been succeeded by one composed of men less distinguished in themselves, with little experience of affairs outside the country, and appointed for the most part from the clergy surrounding the court; the absentee Richard I was succeeded by John, under whom all rational direction of affairs ceased and a complete and lasting rupture with the papacy ensued.