This article identifies the liberties of the Church and the City of London which were intended to be protected by Magna Carta from 1215. The liberties intended were a recognition of a form of autonomy for the Church and the City and have no connection with the individual freedoms that are identified for protection by modern human rights instruments. The clauses in Magna Carta conferring that autonomy are among the very few that have not been repealed, but they have not been asserted for hundreds of years. While the idea of church autonomy has resonance with the ideas of subsidiarity and sphere-sovereignty developed in Catholic and Calvinist social teaching from the late nineteenth century, recent American jurisprudence suggests that religious autonomy may be the best way to defend religious liberty in the future. This article suggests that, just as English kings were persuaded to provide towns, colonial endeavours and eventually corporate free enterprise with limited autonomy for a fee, so charters conferring limited autonomy on religious communities may provide a philosophical and practical basis from which to defend religious liberty in the future, even if the assertion of individual religious liberty becomes politically incorrect.

In the 1580s at Temple Church, a youthful Edward Coke, recently admitted to the bar, most likely witnessed the ‘Battle of the Pulpit’ waged between the Anglican Richard Hooker, who preached on Sunday morning, and the Puritan Walter Travers, who answered him on Sunday afternoon. That contest symbolised a broader conflict between the Anglicans and the Puritans in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England over economic and political affairs that Coke would, in his own way, try to reconcile in both the theory and practice of English law. Embracing Hooker's emphasis on the past and the seamless continuity of the English legal tradition, Coke would endeavour to make it look as though the strong contemporary impulses in favour of economic freedom and parliamentary government, close to the hearts of many Puritans such as Travers, were but a normal expression of the ‘ancient constitution’ associated with the reign of Edward the Confessor in the first half of the eleventh century. Though Coke temporarily succeeded in conciliating some of the Puritans, the compromise would not satisfy everyone.

High-profile cases in the Supreme Court of the United States (‘SCOTUS’) on religion tend to attract a certain amount of academic comment in the United Kingdom but US judgments are cited only infrequently by the superior courts in the UK. In return, SCOTUS rarely cites foreign judgments at all. The reason, it is suggested, is that the effect given by the First Amendment to the US Constitution is to render US case law of less relevance to the UK than, for example, judgments from jurisdictions such as Canada and Australia.

While the English Church shared in celebrating the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, not least its own part in gaining those rights for everyone, the Church of England was reversing the principle that people are innocent until proved guilty. Such is the pressure of today's concern about child abuse, historic and present. As evidence mounts of the injustices done by false accusations against some high-profile public figures, we are less aware of the toll on other individuals whose turmoil does not hit the headlines. Those teaching and caring are often targeted for claims, and the Church of England has been toughening its procedures.

Anglican religious communities are currently experiencing decline. Member numbers are decreasing as their average age increases, recruitment of young people is virtually impossible and it is not uncommon to find a small and dwindling group of elderly religious inhabiting premises designed for a time when committing oneself to life as a member of a religious order was much more fashionable. There are several underlying reasons: young people are offered a wider and more diverse array of possible occupations; employment with a specific employer is no longer undertaken for life, but people tend to move from one job to another and from one sector to another; women in particular have more choices than previously and for those with a religious vocation the priesthood is a more exciting alternative; and, bearing in mind that many Anglican religious communities incline to the Anglo-Catholic end of the spectrum, the Ordinariate beckons.

On 9 May, the EU Justice Sub-Committee of the House of Lords, chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, published a report on the Government's proposals to repeal the Human Rights Act and replace it with a new Bill of Rights – and suggested that there was a forceful case for a Government rethink: