Roman Canon Law in Reformation England

1991 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 342
Author(s):  
James A. Brundage ◽  
Richard H. Helmholz



1991 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-16
Author(s):  
James B. McSwain


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.



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.



2001 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 361
Author(s):  
Eric Josef Carlson ◽  
R. H. Helmholz


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