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ENGLAND shaken off their allegiance to Rome, begging the sovereign pontiff in most respectful language to issue letters of provision or Bulls of confirmation in favor of such and such an ecclesiastic who enjoys the royal favor. No doubt these statutes of Provisors and Praemunire do in some sense play an important part in the history of the English Church during the fourteenth century, though it is admitted that they were so continually set aside that the permanent result of the legislation was greatly to strengthen the development of the king's dispensing power. The Statutes of Provisors, of which the first was passed in 1351, claimed for all electing bodies and patrons the right to elect or to present freely to the benefices in their gift, and moreover declared invalid all appointments brought about by way of papal "provision", i.e. nomination. Two years later this legislation was supplemented by the first Statute of Praemunire, which enacted that those who brought matters cognizable in the King's Courts before foreign courts should be liable to forfeiture and outlawry. It has been maintained that these acts prove that the English Church did not acknowledge any providing power in the Holy See. To this we may reply (I) that, like all the other English bishops, even Grosseteste, who is so constantly represented as the champion of English resistance to papal authority, in this matter fully recognized the right in principle, though he protested against abuses in the use of it; (2) that the legislation at least professed to be passed not in a spirit of hostility to Rome, but as a remedy for manifold abuses caused by "Rome-runners"—priests thronging to Rome and importuning the Holy See for benefices. It was the lay patrons of livings whose interests suffered by the papal provisions who were the chief promoters of the Acts. (3) That the bishops refused to consent to the Acts (Stubbs, "Const. Hist.", III, 340) and caused their formal protest to be entered on the rolls of Parliament; (4) that the bishops and clergy petitioned spontaneously and repeatedly for their repeal (ibid., 342), that the universities, in 1399, declared that the Acts operated to the detriment of learning, and that in 1416 the Commons also petitioned the king for the abolition of the Statute of Provisors; (5) that the kings themselves disregarded the Acts and constantly asked the popes to provide to the sees; (6) that it is universally admitted that papal provisions were more numerous after the passing of the Acts than before. In the 300 years preceding the Reformation 313 bishops are known to have been provided by the popes; of these 47 were before the passing of the Statute, 266 after it (see Moyes in "The Tablet", December 2, 1893). One thing is certain, that England in several instances owed some of her best and holiest prelates to the action of the popes in providing to English sees in opposition to the known wishes of the king. Stephen Langton, in 1205, St. Edmund Rich, in 1232, and John Peckham, in 1279, are conspicuous examples. We have already said above that a reaction against current Anglican theories regarding the position of the pope in the medieval English Church has been steadily growing during the last quarter of a century. The complete agreement of such writers as Professor F. M. Maitland, Dr. James Gairdner, and Mr. H. Rashdall, approaching the subject along quite different lines of research, is very remarkable.' The following passage from one of the most distinguished of the younger school of English historians, Prof. Tout, of Manchester, states the case as frankly as it could have been stated by Lingard himself. After insisting that the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, like that of Laborers or the sumptuary laws, remained a dead letter in practice, and after declaring that to the average clergyman or theologian of the day the pope was the one Divinely appointed source of ecclesiastical authority, the shepherd to whom the Lord had given commission to feed His sheep, Prof. Tout continues: "The antipapal laws of the fourteenth century were the acts of the secular not of the ecclesiastical power. They were not simply antipapal, they were also anticlerical in their tendency, since to the man of the age an attack on the Pope was an attack on the Church. . The clergyman, though his soul grew indignant against the curialists, still believed that the Pope was the divinely appointed autocrat of the Church universal. Being a man, a Pope might be a bad Pope; but the faithful Christian, though he might lament and protest, could not but obey in the last resort. The papacy was so essentially interwoven with the whole Church of the Middle Ages, that few figments have less historical basis than the notion that there was an antipapal Anglican Church in the days of the Edwards" (Polit. Hist. of Eng., III, 379). No one who carefully studies the language and acts of such a man as Grosseteste can fail to realize the truth that in spite of all his fearless criticism of the Roman Curia, his attitude of mind is thoroughly reverential to papal authority. The most famous, as being the least temperately worded, of all his pronouncements is now known to have been addressed, not, as formerly thought, to Pope Innocent IV himself, but to one of his subordinates. On the other hand, as Maitland points out, Grosseteste throughout his life proclaimed in the strongest terms his belief in the plenitude of the papal power. "I know", he says, "and I affirm without any reserve that there belongs to our lord the Pope, and to the Holy Roman Church, the power of disposing freely of all ecclesiastical benefices." And this and similar language, acknowledging, for example, the pope to be the sun from which other bishops, like the moon and stars, receive whatever powers they have to illuminate and fructify the Church, was not only maintained by Grosseteste to the end (see "The Month", March, 1895), but reechoed by Bishop Arundel nearly two centuries afterwards.

So again the occurrences which followed the publication by Boniface VIII of the Bull "Clericis laicos", in the days of Edward I and Archbishop Winchelsea, tend to show that even when the pope took up a position which was too extreme and from which he was forced ultimately to retire, the English Church was not less, but more, loyal to the Apostolic See than other, Continental, nations. Nothing could be less true to the facts of history than the idea that England stood apart from the rest of Christendom, with an ecclesiastical law, a theology, or in any essential matter even a ritual, of her own. The cosmopolitanism of the religious orders, especially the mendicants, and of the universities, would alone have sufficed to render this isolation impossible. England's isolation began when she broke away from the Roman obedience, suppressed the religious orders, banished every Catholic priest, and adopted a pronunciation of Latin which no Continental scholar could understand.

The great disturbing force in the ecclesiastical life of England during the fourteenth century, much more than the Statutes of Provisors or even the Black Death, was the rise and spread of Lollardy. We may perhaps doubt if the significance of the movement in this country was by any means as great as that which historians, partly on account of the Bohemian upheaval under John Hus which grew out of Wyclif's doctrines, partly through the favorite modern theory that Lollardy produced the Reformation, have generally attributed to it. Dr. James Gairdner, however, who has recently investigated the whole movement and its sequelae with a thoroughness and knowledge of original materials to which no previous writer can lay claim, has arrived at conclusions which tend very seriously to modify the views hitherto very commonly received. In his idea the novelty and the socialistic tendency of the opinions so boldly proclaimed by Wyclif did constitute a grave political danger, a danger which was not, perhaps, so acute in