What is the Place of Custom in English Canon Law?

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rupert Bursell

It is now generally recognised that as a matter of history the canon law was applied, subject to variations by local custom, in pre-Reformation England just as much as throughout the rest of Western Christendom. Indeed such local variations were permitted by the canon law itself. As Professor Brooke concluded in The English Church and The Papacy From The Conquest To The Reign of King John:“The English Church recognised the same law as the rest of the Church; it possessed and used the same collections of Church law that were employed in the rest of the Church. There is no shred of evidence to show that the English Church in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was governed by laws selected by itself.”The same was also true until the Reformation.

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 182-209
Author(s):  
Paul Cavill

The break with Rome was enforced through a nationwide programme of oath-taking. The Henrician regime resorted to oaths because they were already fundamental to the functioning of the polity. In the preceding half-century, activities as diverse as heresy prosecution, tax assessment and debt litigation depended upon oaths. Irrespective of their often mundane subject matter, oaths were held to be religious acts. Prolific oath-taking, however, led to frequent oath-breaking. Perjury was therefore a more pressing and broader concept than it is today. It was an offence against God, against oneself and against others. How this crime was prosecuted and punished sheds light on the intersection of religious doctrine, legal systems and social practice in pre-Reformation England. An analysis of perjury also draws attention to a jurisdictional shift that was underway before the Reformation. In 1485, church courts had exercised an extensive cognizance of perjury; by 1535, they no longer did. The most important factor contributing to this decline in ecclesiastical jurisdiction was the constraint imposed by common lawyers on what cases the church courts could hear. Common law defined the crime of perjury more narrowly than did canon law. Hence the contraction of the church's jurisdiction would alter how perjury was perceived.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Doe

This journal has published two distinguished series on the lives and careers of individual jurists in the history of English church law, from the mediaeval period to the late nineteenth century: one by Professor Sir John Baker on ‘famous English canonists’ (1988–1997); and the other by Professor Richard Helmholz on ‘notable ecclesiastical lawyers’ (2013–2017). Most prepared for their professional careers with the study of civil law at Oxford or Cambridge (and before the Reformation also of canon law). Many practised as judges, advocates and proctors in the church courts (until statute ended much of their jurisdiction in the 1850s). Some wrote treatises on church law. A small number were also priests, but less so as the centuries unfolded. While these professional canonists and civilians may have had a monopoly in practising church law, they did not have a monopoly in thinking or writing about it. The clergy, who never trained or practised as lawyers, also had things to say about church law. But the clerical profession has been somewhat neglected by scholarship as a class contributing to the history of church law and jurisprudence. From diocesan bishops through parish priests to clerical scholars in the universities, their books, pamphlets, sermons, letters and other materials often deal with the nature, sources and subjects of church law. Their aims vary: from the educational through the historical or theological to the practical and polemical. These priest-jurists – fathers-in-law, they might quip – contributed much to the intellectual development of church law. One is Robert Owen, a Welsh scholar cleric whose books include Institutes of Canon Law (1884). No scholar has to date unveiled Owen as a notable Anglican priest-jurist – strangely, he has been lost to scholarship as among those whom he himself chided as ‘eminent Canonists’ who ‘hide themselves’ and remain ‘veiled Prophets’.


1964 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 154-159
Author(s):  
P.J. Dunning

The purpose of this short communication is to call attention to an attempt to establish a definitive calendar of Pope Innocent III’s letters to Ireland, and also to indicate very briefly the value of those letters. The two chief ways in which papal letters have been transmitted are through originals or through copies. Copies of letters have survived in a variety of ways: in monastic or episcopal cartularies, in the rolls of royal chancery, in collections of canon law, but for this period mainly in the official papal registers.The dispersal of monastic archives during the Reformation period, together with the deliberate destruction of papal letters after 1536, partly explains why comparatively few original papal letters of medieval popes to the British Isles have survived. For Ireland, only five original letters of Innocent III are at present known to exist. Two of these are confirmations of property: one to the monastery of St Andrew of Stokes of its possessions in Ireland; and the other to the convent of Graney. The three remaining letters are connected with the peace settlement between Pope Innocent III and King John.


Author(s):  
Mary E. Sommar

This is the story of how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel and for others’ behavior toward such slaves. The story begins in the New Testament era, when the earliest Christian norms were established, and continues through the late Roman Empire, the Germanic kingdoms, and the Carolingian Empire, to the thirteenth-century establishment of a body of ecclesiastical regulations (canon law) that would persist into the twentieth century. Chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods, along with an analysis of the various policies and statutes, provide insight into the situations of these unfree ecclesiastical dependents. The book stops in the thirteenth century, which was a time of great changes, not only in the history of the legal profession, but also in the history of slavery as Europeans began to reach out into the Atlantic. Although this book is a serious scholarly monograph about the history of church law, it has been written in such a way that no specialist knowledge is required of the reader, whether a scholar in another field or a general reader interested in church history or the history of slavery. Historical background is provided, and there is a short Latin lexicon.


2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
R. N. Swanson

The records of diocesan and peculiar courts of late medieval England have received extensive academic scrutiny, generating a reasonably clear picture of a hierarchical pyramid ultimately headed by the papal curia. However, that picture is an incomplete depiction of the totality of the ecclesiastical mechanisms of dispute resolution. Existing scholarship largely ignores the use of arbitrated extra-curial settlements to avoid litigation (or, alternatively, a formal sentence). Concentration on the provincial court hierarchy also marginalizes the more directly papal courts of judges delegate and assorted local agents with judicial powers, which functioned within England between 1300 and the Reformation and bypassed the normal fora. Drawing on a wide range of scattered source material, this article introduces these neglected elements of the church's legal system, including the resident papal conservators appointed at the request of petitioners to exercise a general delegated papal judicial authority on their behalf, whose existence has been almost completely unnoticed. It suggests the significance of arbitration, delegation and conservation within the wider structure, and the need to give them much more attention if the practical importance of canon law in pre-Reformation England is to be properly understood and appreciated.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 455
Author(s):  
Efidoren L Nainggolan ◽  
Muhammad Syahrizal ◽  
Saidi Ramadan Siregar

Canonical law is an internal church law governing the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Anglican Communion. How the laws of the church are governed, interpreted and sometimes examined differ fundamentally between the three church bodies. in all three traditions, a canon was originally a rule accepted by an assembly, these canons formed the basis for canon law. Raita algorithm is part of the exact string matching algorithm, which is matching the string exactly with the arrangement of characters in the matched string that has the same number or sequence of characters in the string. Matching strings on the raita algorithm is done through a shift from the right of the character then to the left of the character and to the middle of the character. The problem in this research is the content of canon law in general consists of a very large number of pages of books, this makes it difficult for canonical law users to find the contents needed, then in the search it takes time to find the contents of canonical law that are searched for too many search problems. that is, too much time must be needed to find the contents of the canonical law sought


2020 ◽  
pp. 190-239
Author(s):  
Mary E. Sommar

This is the story of how the church sought to establish norms for slave ownership on the part of ecclesiastical institutions and personnel and for others’ behavior toward such slaves. Chronicles, letters, and other documents from each of the various historical periods, along with an analysis of the various policies and statutes, provide insight into the situations of these unfree ecclesiastical dependents. Although this book is a serious scholarly monograph about the history of church law, it has been written in such a way that no specialist knowledge is required of the reader, whether a scholar in another field or a general reader interested in church history or the history of slavery. Historical background is provided, and there is a short Latin lexicon. This chapter discusses ecclesiastical slavery in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries and provides an in-depth analysis of the official canon law relevant to the question of ecclesiastical servitude.


Ecclesiology ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-325
Author(s):  
Gordon Arthur

AbstractThis paper offers a theological examination of the legal theory underlying the Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church from the time of Gratian onwards, and of the Church of England since the Reformation, comparing the latter with parallel developments in English Common Law. Despite their very different contexts, structures and emphases, a surprising degree of similarity emerges, which may provide a basis for further discussion and convergence in the future.


Author(s):  
Herman J. Selderhuis

Abstract The Impact of Luther’s Reformation on the development of Church Law in the Netherlands. This essay describes how essential the specific history of the reformation in the Netherlands was for the developments of reformed church law in that country. The Dutch reformation was relatively late and was more Calvinistic than Lutheran. Calvin’s model of structuring the church, the essential effect of the refugee situation of many reformed believers and the fact that the revolt as well as the reformation were movements mainly ,from below‘, result in a church polity with the following characteristics: self-government of each individual congregation, active involvement of all church members, independence towards political authorities and a presbyterial-synodical church organisation. This church model was reached through a series of synodical meetings that started in the 1560ies and came to a conclusion at the Synod of Dordt in 1618/1619.


Author(s):  
Herman J. Selderhuis

AbstractThe Impact of Luther’s Reformation on the development of Church Law in the Netherlands. This essay describes how essential the specific history of the reformation in the Netherlands was for the developments of reformed church law in that country. The Dutch reformation was relatively late and was more Calvinistic than Lutheran. Calvin’s model of structuring the church, the essential effect of the refugee situation of many reformed believers and the fact that the revolt as well as the reformation were movements mainly ,from below‘, result in a church polity with the following characteristics: self-government of each individual congregation, active involvement of all church members, independence towards political authorities and a presbyterial-synodical church organisation. This church model was reached through a series of synodical meetings that started in the 1560ies and came to a conclusion at the Synod of Dordt in 1618/1619.


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