Benefit of Clergy in the Time of Edward IV

1917 175 Benefit of Clergy in the time of Downloaded from Edward IV HE despotism of the T-udors, gratefully accepted by a prosperity-loving England, was founded upon the idea T http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ that within the national boundaries the state could brook no rival. Not only must there be no interference from without ; there must also be no competitors within. Only when the state was supreme could order be restored ; only by the extinction of liberties could liberty be gained. This is the general principle which, while far from exhausting its significance, is essential to the understanding of that complicated series of movements known as the English Reformation. at Emory University on August 23, 2015 But the Reformation would hardly have been English if such a principle had been recognized in the abstract and applied in a series of logical and sweeping reforms. It was with the emi- nently practical difficulty of the abuses arising from clerical immunities that Tudor policy was first concerned. These immunities formed by far the most formidable set of liberties by which the new monarchy was threatened, for behind them stood not an over-mighty subject whom a Star Chamber could check, not a local community which based its rights on a royal charter, but an undying and universal corporation, strong in the tradition of centuries, powerful in its influence and wealth, unhesitating in the audacity of its claims. Ultimately it must have become obvious that so long as the existing relations of church and state remained, so long would clerical immunities not only involve possibilities of abuse, but in themselves be symptoms of a menace ; the impulse which led to a fundamental change in these relations came finally from another direction, but when Henry VII restricted benefit of clergy and the use of sanctuary, he was embarking on a course which would in the end have carried him and his successors to a goal he little thought of. Herein lies the importance of his measures of ecclesiastical reform, and in order to understand those measures we have to obtain some clear picture of the conditions which made 176 BENEFIT OF CLERGY IN THE April them necessary. The reforms themselves are well known,1 and the various acts and bulls naturally give evidence as to the abuses they were designed to remedy, but there is room for an attempt to find out more definitely what clerical immunities meant in actual practice during the Yorkist reigns.2 The church in the reign of Edward IV seems deliberately to have sought not only to maintain but also to improve its position. For three hundred years the claims of the state had been steadily advancing. Henry II had been unable to secure the full acceptance of the Constitutions of Clarendon,3 in which he had laid down that clerks should be indicted before secular Downloaded from justices ; yet by the time of Edward II not only indictment but preliminary inquiry was held in the secular courts,4 and in the reign of Edward IV, as will appear below, the trial itself was conducted there and the clerk pleaded his clergy only after conviction. During the fifteenth century, however, the upholders http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ of clerical privilege may well have thought that they had found their opportunity in the weakness of kings who were willing to purchase ecclesiastical support, and in the breakdown of administrative order. The completeness of this breakdown can be illustrated from the abuses concerned with that secular justice which the clergy sought to escape. In 1465 Margaret Paston, in despair of at Emory University on August 23, 2015 finding any one who would hold her court in her manor of Drayton and thus face the ' pepill that shuld be there of the Duke of Suffolk's parte ', at last fell back upon her chaplain, Sir James Gloys, whom she sent with one Thomas Bonde to perform a duty which certainly proved to be perilous. In the manor yard at Drayton, Thomas and James met the duke's agents who had come to hold the court for him and were supported by sixty persons or more, ' sum of hem havyng rusty pollexis and byllys '. Bonde was seized, his arms were bound ' behynde hym with whippe cord like a theffe ', and he was carried, finally, to Norwich. Sir James, though his authority as John Paston's messenger was rudely set aside, seems to have escaped more lightly.5 It is worthy of note in passing that the chaplain woujd not at any time have been able to plead his clergy in the court over which he was now sent to preside, for the offences of which the manorial courts took cognizance were not clergyable, and a parson had no more protection than any one else if he cut 1 Cf. Pollard, Reign of Henry VII, i. lxiv ff. 2 The evidence quoted in the following pages has been collected with special reference to three dioceses, Lincoln, Norwich, and Ely, which stretched from the Humber to the Thames. The conclusions reached, therefore, apply to the east of England, though nothing has been found to suggest that conditions in this district were peculiar. » Adams, Political History of England, p. 300. 4 Year Books (Selden Society), v, pp. lxxiiif. 6 Paston Letters, ii. 214, 215. 1917 TIME OF EDWARD IV 177 down a hedge overhanging the common way,6 or tied his horses in the road,7 or diverted a watercourse to the damage of his neighbours,8 or overburdened the village common ' cum bestis et animalibus suis '.9 A vicar or rector was in no way helped by his cloth or his tonsure when he went poaching, as he often did, with ferrets and nets on the great rabbit warrens of Norfolk.10 But it was not only those who presided in manorial courts who might meet with violent opposition. In 3 Edward IV the king's justices were prevented from holding the sessions in Cambridge by Thomas Parson and others whom he had Downloaded from assembled. The object of these men was to prevent their own indictment, and the audacity of their action well illustrates the lengths to which it was possible to go, and shows that in truth ' the world [was] right wild '. They said that all those that were empanelled to be at Cambridge before the said justices http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ that indicted the said Thomas Parsons or any of them of any treasons, felonies or trespasses by them done, they would seek in their houses and smite off their heads, and furthermore they sent their messengers to tha said justices, saying with that condition that the said Thomas Parsons nor none of them of the said treasons, insurrections and trespasses should be indicted, they would that the said sessions by the said Justices should be holden or else that they would put them in devoir to let the said Justices to keep any sessions.11 at Emory University on August 23, 2015 In Kent the vicar of a certain parish seems to have been prominent in upholding disorder, or, as he may have preferred to put it, in defending local liberties. He announced to hi$ parishioners with a loud voice from the pulpit that if any sheriff or other minister of the king should come to the town he should then ring the great bell of the church, and at the sound all the inhabitants were to assemble and slay the officer, in order that no royal writ should be executed- One of the king's bailiffs was actually thus attacked, but the parson was afterwards indicted before the justices.12 Even if judicial forms were observed, maintenance and embracery often made the obtaining of justice impossible, and men seem to have given full scope to their ingenuity in the invention of feigned actions and new methods of fraud. Number- less illustrations may be found in the Early Chancery Proceedings, but it will be enough here to quote the case of a certain unhappy • Public Record Office, Court Rolls, bundle 178, no. 16. ' Ibid., bundle 104, no. 1411. ' Ibid., bundle 179, no. 70. • Ibid., bundle 213, no. 61. 10 Public Record Office, Duchy of Lancaster Court Rolls, bundle 103, nos. 1417, 1419. » Public Record Office, Ancient Indictments, files 8, 306. » Ibid., Hie 311. VOI,. XXXII.—NO. CXXVI. N 178 BENEFIT OF CLERGY IN THE April Jayman, by name Thomas Smoulding. The said Thomas petitioned the chancellor for a writ of corpus cum causa directed to the bailiffs of Norwich, who had kept him in ward on divers feigned actions of trespass taken against him before the sheriffs by two men and a woman of that city. A writ of supersedeas against these three had already been obtained and delivered to the mayor, but they had made up their minds not to submit, and by mediation of divers friends of theirs the matter was kept hanging undetermined till the time for the return of the attachment had expired, and when the day was past the three ' bade Downloaded from your suppliant go do his worst, and made him a mok and a jape '. He obtained another writ of attachment, but they advanced new pleas of trespass, and he was not admitted to bail, but was kept in the prison house, fettered with great fetters, and tied with a great chain to a great ' stok ', how as though he had been http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ a great errant thief or a traitor.13 The ecclesiastics who held courts were no more able than other lords to cause that justice should be done.

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