Arbitration, Delegation, Conservation: Marginalized Mechanisms for Dispute Resolution in the Pre-Reformation English Church

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
R. N. Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Dispute Resolution ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Late Medieval England

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.

Parochial Conformity and Voluntary Religion in Late-Medieval England

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 173-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gervase Rosser
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Late Medieval England

Much evidence has been brought to light recently to demonstrate the vitality of religious life among the English laity on the eve of the Reformation. Attention has been drawn to the fact that, in the period before the advent of Protestantism, lay men and women evinced a high degree of commitment to their church. The religious changes of the sixteenth century are as pressing a historical problem as ever; moreover, they provide a valuable litmus with which to test the qualities of the late-medieval church. Nevertheless, there is a danger that the fascination of the Reformation question, together with the bias of documentary sources on lay religion towards the latter end of the medieval period, may impoverish our appreciation of the ways in which, for a thousand years, Christians in Britain had been shaping their religious lives. To take a long view of religious voluntarism may help to put the developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in a proper perspective. There has also been a tendency, in discussion of lay religious life in the late middle ages, to accept the institutional framework as given. Yet in practice that framework was both adjustable and expressive of a wide range of lay initiatives in religion. That men and women were prepared to lend material support to a variety of religious institutions is apparent from any medieval collection of wills or set of churchwardens' accounts. But what, exactly, was expressed by such support? This is not an easy question to answer. Any assessment calls for an understanding of the medieval parish, not as a legal abstraction, nor yet as a supposedly ‘natural’ community of inhabitants, but as a more or less adaptable framework shaped by, and in turn shaping, the lives of the members. The evidence of religious activity, from processions to church-building, is, so far as it goes, not hard to find. But what of the parochial structure which gave meaning to these gestures, and which could in turn be modified by them?

The Dangers of Diversity: Heresy and Authority in the 1405 Case of John Edward

2007 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 230-240
Author(s):  
Ian Forrest
Keyword(s):  
Christian Faith ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Fundamental Challenge ◽  
Large Audience ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Tableau Vivant

When John Edward of Brington in Northamptonshire abjured heresy in the ‘Greneyerd’ of Norwich cathedral close on Palm Sunday 1405, he was presented to the gathered crowds as a living example of the dangers of diversity in the Christian faith. Because heresy was feared as a fundamental challenge to doctrine, authority, and social harmony, the agents of Church and crown went to great lengths in the period between 1382 and the Reformation to advertise its depravity and illegality. The anti-heresy message was not, however, a simple one, and the judicial performances that constitute the Church’s propaganda campaign on this issue sometimes used highly equivocal rhetoric and images. In these performances heresy was capable of being represented as a minority sectarian problem, or one diffused throughout society. In truth it was both, and so the anti-heresy message had to encompass much more nuance than one might imagine. This essay focuses on the campaign against the lollards in late medieval England, in particular John Edward’s staged abjuration, which is recorded in a letter sent by the presiding bishop, Henry Despenser, to his archbishop, Thomas Arundel. This certification presents a compelling tableau vivant encompassing the penitent, the crowds, and the authorities of Church, crown, and city. In their efforts to stage-manage the abjuration of heresy, however, these authorities had not only to navigate the complexity of anti-heretical rhetoric and present it to a large audience, but, perhaps more importantly, had to overcome considerable rancour and division within their own ranks, to present a unified front against the threat of heresy. For they had to show diat there was a unity from which heretics were deviating. Edward’s abjuration, therefore, offered an important opportunity to demonstrate repentance, and to invite the clergy and people of Norwich to consider the dangers posed by their own tendencies towards disunity.

Epilogue

World of Echo ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 195-206
Author(s):  
Adin E. Lears
Keyword(s):  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Personal Relationship ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Access To Knowledge ◽  
The Voice ◽  
John Wyclif

This chapter argues that an attunement to extrasemantic experiences of language that is understood in terms of noise lays epistemologies and literacies that effloresced in myriad forms in late medieval England. It reviews impulses to experience and express language as noise, which were a means of cultivating direct access to knowledge through affective and sensory experience. It also reviews the ideas of John Wyclif and his followers that overlapped with the avenues of thought, feeling, and sensation. The chapter investigates how Wyclif and his followers are known for their desire to limit clerical authority by encouraging a deep personal relationship to the biblical word in a way that scholars have suggested was a precursor to the Reformation. It examines the world of echo that emphasized the material qualities of the voice in opposition to the Wycliffite ideal of bodily transcendence.

What is the Place of Custom in English Canon Law?

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 12-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rupert Bursell
Keyword(s):  
Canon Law ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Church Law ◽  
The Church ◽  
King John

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.

Between Reform and Reformation: The English Church in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

1990 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 647-678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Heath
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Current Version ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Church

Forty years ago the story of the Church in late medieval England was a simple one and not very different from the version which had prevailed half a century before that. The interpretation presented by W. Capes in 1900 had been slightly modified but largely underlined by 1950, and the Church and its development which was commonly depicted in that year would not have been strikingly unfamiliar to him. The current version was that, after the reforming efforts of the thirteenth century, which failed to achieve their end, and the advent of the friars, who even by the middle of that century were departing from their earlier zeal and purity, the Church in the following hundred years was exploited by the pope when it was not saved or oppressed by the Crown. The resulting corruption of the clergy contributed to its negligence and provoked an eruption of heresy which in due course was savagely suppressed and virtually expunged; rid of this threat, the fifteenth-century clergy were so notorious for their laxity, greed and mediocrity that a few devout members of the laity, perhaps inspired by the mystical writings, took refuge in private devotions which anticipated the individualism of the Protestant. The Reformation was viewed as the inescapable result of these circumstances.

Superior Spirituality Versus Popular Piety in Late-Medieval England

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 89-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. K. McHardy
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
John Wycliffe ◽  
Church Life ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval England

When K. B. McFarlane wrote his biography of John Wycliffe he was surprised to find that the hero who emerged was not Wycliffe himself but his implacable opponent, William Courtenay, the archbishop of Canterbury from 1381 to 1396. ‘Justice has never been done to Courtenay’s high qualities, above all to the skill and magnanimity with which he led his order through the crisis that now threatened it’, he wrote admiringly, adding by way of explanation that, ‘Since the reformation his has been the unpopular side.’ The impression McFarlane gave is that there were two ecclesiastical camps in late fourteenth-century England: heretical and orthodox. The fabric of English church life was fractured then, for ever, by the beliefs and work of Wycliffe and his adherents; was not McFarlane’s biography entitled John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity? Yet McFarlane’s assessment of heresy was that this was far from being a monolithic movement; indeed, in a private letter he wrote, ‘Wycliffe was merely an extremist in a widespread reform movement.’

Plowshares and Swords: Clerical Involvement in Acts of Violence and Peacemaking in Late Medieval England,c.1400–1536

2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Thiery
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Interpersonal Aggression ◽  
Personal Relations ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Reformation England ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
The Village ◽  
Parish Priests

“My men should use their swords and bucklers…but if John Stanshaw is in one alehouse then I will be in another.”To historians of medieval and Reformation England, these lines should not be all that surprising. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the heyday of livery and maintenance, ritualized effrontery was in vogue among the affluent and they often employed large retinues of armed servants as signs of potency and prestige. However, it may surprise some to learn that the above statement was uttered by a priest, Geoffrey Elys, vicar of Thatcham (Berks.), around the beginning of the sixteenth century. Though the medieval Church tirelessly struggled to convince its flock of the wickedness of interpersonal aggression, its own servants were not immune to bouts of conflict and strife. As R. N. Swanson cautions in his study of parish priests, the clergy “can be considered as a group; but they were also individuals who created their own careers and had their own personal relations with their parishioners.” Indeed, the conduct of clerics in their parish communities, especially their violent conduct, can be quite baffling if one only evaluates it by the criteria of ecclesiastical proscription and fails to recognize that such proscription was just one thick strand of an intricate web of relations and expectations. In his examination of thirteenth-century parish priesthood, J. Goering has traced the transition of pastors from merely members of the village to semi-detached individuals who were compelled to abide by both village customs and the values of a more unified and doctrinally authoritative Church.

Chichester and its cathedral on the eve of the Reformation

Urban History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-186
Author(s):  
Spencer Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Economy ◽  
Entrepreneurial Activity ◽  
Urban Decline ◽  
Wealth Creation ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Real Estate Management

Chichester challenges the orthodoxy of urban decline and a decadent church in late medieval England through the proactive role of the Dean and Chapter of the cathedral as landowner and developer; civic-ecclesiastical harmony; an economic and social environment conducive to wealth creation, entrepreneurial activity, investment and real estate management; productive artisans; and social cohesion. Comparisons with other cathedral cities furthers our embryonic understanding of the urban economy in this genre.

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