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Long translated as “abuse,” the Latin word excessus actually meant, in the pontifical letters, offences and crimes committed by all the faithful, but especially by the clergy and its highest dignitaries, the prelates. From the middle of the twelfth century (pontificates of Eugene the Third and Alexander the Third), their reading reveals a multiplication of the occurrences of this word, of the denunciations of the faults that refer to it, and an extension of its meaning in conjunction with more precision as well. This fact is related to the multiplication of inquiries and to transformations in the canonical procedures; an example is the inquiry on fame, an elaborate form in the early years of Innocent the Third’s pontificate. In parallel, the decretist’s reflections bear witness to their efforts to promote these transformations. For instance, in some glosses of Gratian’s Decretum, they were both extending the list of the excepted cases and asserting that criminal and infamous people, ordinarily not allowed to testify, should be allowed to accuse and to testify as well. The fact that heresy was almost never identified as an excessus suggests that the extension of the cases of excessus is hardly related to it, at least not directly. On the other hand, the transformations of the procedure of inquiry are obviously not based on a salutary reaction to an absolute multiplication of “excesses,” but on the expressed will of the popes to make the Church perfect. Denunciation and punishment of the excesses of the clergy therefore have to be understood as central to the mode of Church government.