Home >
Law >
Legal History >
Church Courts and the People in Seventeenth-Century England: Ecclesiastical Justice in Peril at Winchester, Worcester and Wells

Church Courts and the People in Seventeenth-Century England: Ecclesiastical Justice in Peril at Winchester, Worcester and Wells

Author: Andrew Thomson
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 9781800083141

Published In: September 2022
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only
Hardback Edition ISBN: 9781800083158

$43.23

Download Order Form

Add to Wishlist
| Add to Compare

Description
Contents

Details

Religion meant far more in early modern England than church on Sundays, a baptism, a funeral or a wedding ceremony. The Church was fully enmeshed in the everyday lives of the people; in particular, their morals and religious observance. The Church imposed comprehensive regulations on its flock, and it employed an army of informers and bureaucrats, headed by a diocesan chancellor, to enable its courts to enforce the rules. Church courts lay, thus, at the very intersection of Church and people.

The courts of the seventeenth century – when ‘a cyclonic shattering’ produced a ‘great overturning of everything in England’ – have, surprisingly, had to wait until now for scrutiny. Church Courts and the People in Seventeenth-Century England offers a detailed survey of three dioceses across the whole of the century, examining key aspects such as attendance at court, completion of business and, crucially, the scale of guilt to test the performance of the courts.

While the study will capture the interest of lawyers to clergymen, or from local historians to sociologists, its primary appeal will be to researchers in the field of Church history. For students and researchers of the seventeenth century, it provides a full account of court operations, measuring the extent of control, challenging orthodoxies about excommunication, penance and juries, contextualising ecclesiastical justice within major societal issues of the times and, ultimately, presents powerful evidence for a ‘church in danger’ by the end of the century.

List of abbreviations

Foreword - Trevor Beeson

Acknowledgements

Map: The Dioceses of England And Wales 1535—4

Introduction

Fundamentals: courts and officials

The nature of Church discipline

The extent of Church discipline

Explaining the decline

The case of Worcester

The failure of reform

Appendices