342               Constitutional History            [chap.

of the English crown, ‘ which hath been so free at all times that
it hath been in subjection to no earthly sovereign, but im-
mediately subject to God and no other, in all things touching
the regalie of the said crown.’ The lords spiritual had admitted
that such encroachments were contrary to the right of the
crown, and promised to stand by the king. It was accordingly
enacted that all persons procuring in the court of Rome or
elsewhere such translations, processes, sentences of excommuni-
cations, bulls, instruments, or other things which touch the
king, his crown, regality, or realm, should suffer the penalties
of praemuniιe. Archbishop Courtenay’s protest already re-
ferred to, whilst it admits the facts stated in the preamble,
simply guards against limiting the canonical authority of the
pope : the words of the protest are incorporated in the statute
itself¹. Nor was the legislation exemplified in the statutes of
praemunire and provisors a mere ‘ brutum fulmen ; ’ although
evaded by the kings,—notably by Richard himself in the trans-
lation of Arundel to S. Andrew’s in 1397,—and, so far at least
as the statute of provisors was concerned, suspended from time
to time by consent of the parliament, it was felt by the popes
to be a great check on their freedom of action; it was used
by Gloucester as a weapon against Beaufort ; the clergy, both
under papal influence and independently, petitioned from time
to time for its repeal² ; and in the hands of Henry VIII it
became a lever for the overthrow of papal supremacy. It
furnishes in ecclesiastical history the clue of the events that
connect the Constitutions of Clarendon with the Reformation;
and, if in a narrative of the internal history of the constitution
itself it seems to take a secondary place, it is only because the
influences which it was devised to check were everywhere at
work, and constant recurrence to their potent action would

¹ 16 Ric. II, c. 5 ; Statutes, ii. 84.

² In the convocation of 1439 especially ; see Wilkins, Cone. iii. 533 ;
and again in 1447 ; ib. p. 555. It is fair to say that these clerical remon-
strances were called forth rather by the chicanery of the lawyers than by
any affection for the papal jurisdiction; the lawyers now and then elɪo-e to
treat the ordinary ecclesiastical jurisdiction as foreign, and so to bring all
the courts Christian under the opeɪ ation of the statute of praemunire.

involve two separate readings of the history of every great crisis
and every stage of growth.

394. The several legislative measures hy which at various Legislates
times the crown or the parliament endeavoured to regulate by the state

• ι 1    1        ii                with the

the proceedings of the national church may be best arranged national
by reference to the particular subject-matter of the acts. They
are important constitutional muniments, but are not very
numerous or diversified. First among them come the ordin-
ances or statutes by which the tenure of church property was
defined and its extension limited. The establishment of the Concordat
obligation of homage and fealty due for the temporalities or and Ansei_m.
lands of the clergy was the result of a compromise between
Henry I and Anselm, and it was accordingly not so much an
enactment made by the secular power against the ecclesiastical,
as a concordat betwixt the two. It was not so with the mort-
main act, or with the series of provisions in which the statute
^t de religiosis ’ was prefigured, from the great charter down-

To forbid the acquisition of lands by the clergy Restriction,
without the consent of the overlord of whom the lands were acquisition

held was a necessary measure, and one to which a patriotic
ecclesiastic like Langton would have had no objection to urge.
But the spirit of the clergy had very much changed between Statute ^,⅛
1215 and i2↑9, and the statute ^t de religiosis,’ which was not
so much an act of parliament as a royal ordinance, was issued
at a moment when there was much irritation of feeling between
the king and the archbishop¹. It was an efficient limitation Clerical

.₁            , ʌ . ...            1    . ,      .                                 disquietude

on the greed oɪ acquisition, and although very temperately under the
administered by the kings, who never withheld their licence ^ɪɪɪ ’
from the endowment of any valuable new foundation, it was
viewed with great dislike by the popes, who constantly urged
its repeal, and by the monks whose attempts to frustrate the
intention of the law, by the invention of trusts and uses, are
regarded by the lawyers as an important contribution to the
land-law of the middle ages. Other instances of legislation less Church
directly affecting the lands of the church were the acts byj⅛*t_o⁸the
which the estates of the Templars were transferred to the Law.™⁰"

¹ Vol. iɪ. pp. ιι6, ιιy.

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