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‘In Love and Charity with your Neighbours …’: Ecclesiastical Courts and Justices of the Peace in England in the Eighteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

W. M. Jacob
W. M. Jacob*
Affiliation:
London
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Extract

The aim of this paper is to account for the busyness of the ecclesiastical courts in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, and to suggest why, apart from matters of strictly ecclesiastical business, and defamation, matrimonial and probate causes, their business declined during the second half of the century.

The ecclesiastical courts in the first part of the century were a popular part of the lowest level of judicial activity in England. That the churchwardens of St Mary’s Beverley paid the ringers 2s. 6d in 1721 for ringing when ‘the Spiritual Court Men came’ suggests the arrival of the consistory court to conduct business in a town was an occasion of note. Archdeacons’ and consistory courts show evidence of considerable activity in almost every diocese in which research has been undertaken about eighteenth-century church life. The diocese of Ely seems to be the exception, where the evidence for much activity in the courts peters out in 1704.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 40: Retribution, Repentance, and Reconciliation , 2004 , pp. 205 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2004

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References

1 East Riding of Yorkshire County Record Office, PE1/1111; St Mary’s Beverley Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1721–2.

2 For a summary of recent research and an account of the church courts in the eighteenth century, see Jacob, W. M., Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1996), 135–54 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19 The Diary of Henry Prescott, LL.B., de Puty Registrar of Chester Diocese, Vol. 1, 28 March 1704–24 March 1711, ed. John Addy, The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 127 (Gloucester, 1987), 79.

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22 Diary of Henry Prescott, I: 253, 257.

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24 Richard Clark, ‘Anglicanism, Recusancy and Dissent in Derbyshire 1603–1703’, unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1979, 225.

25 NRO, NDR ACT 100.

26 NRO, NDR Norwich Archdeaconry General Visitation Books, Book 9.

27 NRO, NDR ACT 96.

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29 Articles of Enquiry Addressed to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford at the Primary Visitation of Dr Thomas Seeker, 1738, ed. H. A. Lloyd Jukes, Oxfordshire Record Society Series 3 8 (Oxford, 1957), 165.

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52 For the various hypotheses advanced for the decline of the church courts, see Jacob, Lay People and Religion, 151–4.