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Bishops, Parliament and Trial by Peers: Clerical Opposition to the Confiscation of Episcopal Temporalities in the Fourteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2016

MATTHEW PHILLIPS
MATTHEW PHILLIPS*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Lenton Grove, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article demonstrates that from the mid- to late fourteenth century the English clergy pursued a sustained campaign to protect episcopal temporalities from royal seizure by asserting the right of bishops to be judged by their peers in parliament. The most important stage of this movement came in the parliament of January 1352 when the clergy made a case for episcopal exceptionalism in English law. The legal identity of bishops in England underwent a seismic shift and it was conceded that in certain cases a bishop should be judged in accordance with his temporalities rather than his spiritual office.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 288 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

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22 PROME, Jan. 1352, item 66.

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25 Stratford succeeded in gaining the support of the commons at the assembly. See Phillips, ‘Church, crown and complaint’, 219–20.

26 PROME, Jan. 1352, item 66; TNA, KB 27/359, 25–25d. The bishop was convicted for refusing to act on a writ of quare non admisit. This was a rare measure: Gray, J. W., ‘The Ius praesentandi in England from the Constitutions of Clarendon to Bracton’, EHR lxvii (1952), 505 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and n. 3.

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30 PROME, Jan. 1352, introduction.

31 Ibid. item 66.

32 Despite Stratford's appeal to the jurisdiction of parliament, no article of gravamina relating to trial by peers was raised in 1341: PROME, Apr. 1341, items 18–25; Phillips, ‘Church, crown and complaint’, 231–42.

33 PROME, Jan. 1352, item 60.

34 I would like to thank Margaret McGlynn for allowing me to read, in advance of publication, her article ‘From charter to common law: the rights and liberties of the pre-Reformation Church’, in Robin Griffith-Jones and Mark Hill (eds), Magna Carta, religion and rule of law, Cambridge 2015, 53–69. See also Common lawyers on the Church: readings from the pre-Reformation inns of court, ed. Margaret McGlynn (Selden Society cxxix, 2012).

35 Keeney, Judgment by peers, 95.

36 See n. 12 above.

37 J. G. Bellamy, The law of treason in England in the later Middle Ages, Cambridge 1970, 67–82; SR i. 319–20.

38 Anthony Musson and W. M. Ormrod, The evolution of English justice: law, politics and society in the fourteenth century, London 1999, 27.

39 PROME, June 1344, item 23.

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46 Concilia Magna Britanniae et Hiberniae, ed. D. Wilkins, iii, London 1737, 24; PROME, 1352, introduction.

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48 B. Wilkinson, ‘A letter of Edward iii to his chancellor and treasurer’, EHR xlii (1927), 250–1.

49 SR i. 294.

50 For discussion of the bishop's contemporary biography see Aberth, Criminal churchmen, p. xxiii.

51 Ibid. 136–9.

52 Davis, William Wykeham, 63–70.

53 PROME, Jan. 1377, item 85.

54 The St Albans chronicle I, 1376–1394: the Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, ed. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkiss, Oxford 2003, 61; The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333–1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith, Manchester 1927, 96–8.

55 St Albans chronicle, 93; P. Partner, ‘William Wykeham and the historians’, in R. Custance (ed.), Winchester College, sixth-centenary essays, Oxford 1982, 10.

56 CCR, 1377–81, 36.

57 Nigel Saul, Richard II, London 1999, 27.

58 Aston, ‘The impeachment of Bishop Despenser’, 127–48.

59 Ibid. 130.

60 PROME, Oct. 1383, item 22.

61 Aston, Thomas Arundel, 368–73.

62 PROME, Sept. 1397, item 16.

63 The chronicle of Adam Usk, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson, Oxford 1997, 25.

64 For the success of the Commons in this area see Dodd, Justice and grace, 133–55.

65 P. A. Bromhead, The House of Lords and contemporary politics, 1911–1957, London 1958, 256–7; A. K. R. Kiralfy, Potter's historical introduction to English law and its institutions, London 1958, 180.

66 Holdsworth, A history of English law, 357–8.

67 Lovell, Trial by peers, 73. See also William R. Anson, The law and custom of the constitution, i, London 1910, 227.