ABSTRACT
For bishops hold office “under Crist”; they are the servants of the King of Heaven, and it is their prime duty to administer His justice in the court of confession, hearing cases, and dispensing sentence and pardon, in the form of penance and absolution. Christ, the supreme Bishop and Judge, will condemn them with a justice both poetic and exact: from the “consistorium palatii summi regis in quo leges et iura discernet”. For the justice it is the King’s function through his laws to uphold is sacred, and a part of divine law; it is the iura regis Christi speaialia that he administers. The King must temper justice with the mercy of the New Law, and if he does so he will himself enjoy that mercy. Langland has thus fused in one speech two apparently contradictory features of the divine law: the mercy of the Lex Christi, as opposed to the nudum ius of the laws of Abraham and Mose.
