Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/188

 180 THE GREAT STATUTE OF PRAEMUNIRE April mitted to them and all others in which his crown and prerogative were concerned. 1 Whereupon the king, ' with the assent aforesaid and at the prayer of his said commons ', ordained and established penalties for certain, offences in the terms already quoted. Now the enacting part of the statute was evidently carelessly drafted ; at several points its meaning is open to dispute ; and single words or phrases must not be taken too strictly. It may be that when the framers of the act spoke of ' such ' bulls or any- thing else prejudicial to the king ' as is aforesaid ', they merely meant ' documents prejudicial to the king in the same kind of way as those indicated in the preamble ', and so intended the act to apply to all documents that encroached on the rights of the Crown. But it is more natural to apply a stricter interpretation to the words tieux and come devant est dit. They need not have been inserted at all if the act was meant to cover every document prejudicial to the king. Moreover, they direct attention to the preamble. Now the preamble is clearly worded with some care. It deals with two specific questions, papal action against churchmen for executing certain royal mandates and the transla- tion of prelates without their assent or that of the king. No other topic is mentioned. The lords spiritual, when asked for their opinion, drew some nice distinctions, and in their replies kept meticulously to the cases put forward by the commons. 2 It is most improbable that the king would claim their assent to the act, as he did, if it really went far beyond the matters submitted to them ; and in view of the preamble it is natural to regard the words tieux and come devant est dit as referring precisely to documents indicated therein, those, that is to say, used by the pope in execution of his measures against the ecclesiastics specified and in carrying out arbitrary translations. Apart from the actual wording of the statute there is much evidence in favour of the view that it was intended by those who passed it to serve a strictly limited purpose, and that it was long before it was regarded as a measure of much importance. In the first place it had the assent of the lords spiritual. Even if we did not possess their guarded statements in reply to the questions put to them at the instance of the commons, it would be wellnigh incredible that they should have agreed to a measure which warned the pope off the whole of the ground disputed between church and state. Neither in the statutes of provisors of 1351 and 1390, nor in the statute of praemunire of 1353, is the 1 ' Les ditz seignours espiritueles veullent et deivent estere ovesque le Roy ... en ceux cases loialment en sustenance de sa Corone et en touz autres cases touchantz sa Corone et regalie come ils sount tenuz par lour ligeance ' : Statutes, ii. 86. eases as they were bound by their allegiance ; but this is merely common form and in any case of little value from men whose allegiance was double.
 * It is true that they added a general promise to uphold the king's rights in all