Kings, Courts, Cures, and Sinecures: The Statute of Provisors and the Common Law

The notion that the pursuit of self-interest can ultimately bring universal good used to be widely held, but with the demise of the Manchester School of economics and of Herbert Spencer's philosophy it has almost completely gone out of favor. We are apt to forget that trial by jury, due process, and the rest of the beneficent heritage of medieval law originated in royal courts which were primarily interested in defending and promoting the king's interests, whatever the cost to others' rights or ideas of justice. For many years necessities of government warped the growth of English law where the king's needs were most closely engaged. His requirements shaped the remedies, his prerogatives shaped the possibilities of defense, while those who might stand in his way received nothing for their protection but the right to petition, and those who did not affect his immediate interests might be sent elsewhere to find their justice. At no time was this more evident than when the interests of the medieval clergy in their ecclesiastical benefices, already eroded by papal provisions, were attacked anew by the Common Law to aid the royal treasury.

Grosseteste and the Theory of Papal Sovereignty

‘Because of the obedience by which I am bound to the Apostolic See…filially and obediently, I do not obey, I oppose, I rebel.’ The more we learn of Robert Grosseteste's achievements as theologian and scientist the less likely does it seem that he will be remembered in the future—as he used to be in the past—principally for this letter of defiance concerning papal provisions in the diocese of Lincoln. Yet the letter itself remains something of an enigma in spite of all the attention it has received from a long line of scholars. It may seem an unprofitable task to go gleaning in a field where workers like Maitland and Sir Maurice Powicke have helped with the harvest, but we would suggest that Grosseteste's direct refusal to obey an unambiguous papal command has never been adequately analysed from one obvious point of view—as an extreme instance of a classical problem of political theory, the right to resist an unjust command of a divinely ordained power.

Petitions for Benefices from English Universities during the Great Schism

Few topics in ecclesiastical history have demanded so much revision and revaluation as the papal collation of benefices. Earlier generations of historians, even if they treated with reserve the criticism of provisions voiced by Matthew Paris, nevertheless regarded the successive general reservations from 1265 to 1362 as a glaring invasion of the rights of ordinary collators: juris ordinariorum locorum usurpacio, as Dietrich of Niem called them in 1410. Papal provisions of whatsoever category were represented as acts of administrative intervention which aroused national feeling, especially in this country, to statutory counter-measures; as an abuse, not only because they introduced the non-resident alien into the English dioceses, but also because they diverted the normally resident incumbent from his cure in order to defend his title at the Court of Rome.