Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/205

 1922 THE GREAT STATUTE OF PRAEMUNIRE 197 its effect. Nothing more is heard of attempts by Boniface IX to defeat the sentences of English courts in the way described in the statute. Arbitrary translations, if not entirely stopped, were not used as a means of coercing the English government. The fact was that whatever card the pope of Rome played, the English Crown could always trump it as long as there was also a pope at Avignon. Boniface IX, in his first zeal, had plunged into controversy with England as though he had been Boniface VIII. But the preamble of the statute of 1393 told him plainly that if he persisted in his intentions he would be regarded as an enemy of the Crown and nation. He took the hint : the French were threatening his position in Italy, and they and the English were drawing together. It was no time for desperate measures, and while he continued his attempts to rid himself of the statute of provisors and perhaps even repeated his request for the abolition of the writ of quare impedit, 1 he contented himself in future with the methods of polite diplomacy. Having served its purpose the statute would naturally fall into obscurity. It reappears in the record of the proceedings of the convocation of Canterbury which met in November 1439. 2 The archbishop, in his speech on the causes of its summons, declared that ecclesiastical jurisdiction was being unwontedly disturbed and injured by royal writs, especially the writ ' de praemunire facias '. After discussion of the matter a petition to the king was drafted. It stated that in a parliament 3 in the sixteenth year of Richard II divers punishments and processes by writs of praemunire facias were ordained against those who sued in the court of Rome or elsewhere, against any of the king's lieges, regarding anything which was against the king and his crown, as was more fully set forth in the same statute. The statute, however, was obscurely worded, and understood by some in a sense different from that intended by those who made it. For some maintained that it applied to those who sued in courts Christian or feudal courts within the realm, just as much as to those who sued in the court of Rome. This interpretation, the petition urged, was too stringent and would utterly destroy spiritual and feudal jurisdiction and gravely injure the status still sitting, in which the keepers of the passage at the chief ports were ordered to seize all bulls and other documents coming from abroad and to bring them before the council (Rot. Claus. 16 Ric. II, mm. 14 d, 18). By 15 June following this strictness had been relaxed, and the officials concerned were to arrest only such bulls as they deemed prejudicial to the Crown and the realm (Rot. Pat. 16 Ric. II, fo. 3, m. 7 d). 1 The St. Albans chronicles say that the bishop of Dax asked for this in 1398 (Ann, Ric. II, p. 228 ; Walsingham, op. cit., ii. 228). 2 Wilkins, iii. 533 seqq. 3 Held, according to the petition, at Westminster : a slip which is a warning not to make too much of the wording of the commission of the bishop of Dax in 1398 (supra, p. 190).