Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/288

 274 //. FROM THE llOO'S TO THE 1800'S of change in the relation between Church and State was set on foot for nearly seventeen years. Then the business of the divorce at Rome, and the discontent of the king with the half-hearted support of the clergy at home, completed his disgust, and he set out in the course of radical change. Having in 1531 compelled the clergy by the threat of prae- munire to recognise him as supreme head ' quantum per Christi legem hcet," he induced the Commons in 1532 to present a petition or remonstrance against the whole theory and practice of the canon law. They attacked the power of the clergy to make canons in convocation, they protested against the exaction of fees and mortuaries, and deliberately impugned the honesty and purity of the episcopal courts in all their branches and with reference both to jurisdiction and to procedure. This petition had two results ; the parliament passed bills to limit the benefit of clergy and forbid feoff- ments to the use of churches. An earlier session in 1529 had attempted to deal with probate and mortuaries ; this, by the Statute of Citations, cut down the power of the Archbishop of Canterbury to entertain suits from other dioceses except by appeal or on request, and so struck at the root of the universal jurisdiction enjoyed by the Court of Arches and its advocates. The same term — the second^ result of the king's policy — the Convocation was compelled to surrender its right of meeting and legislating, and_to_cgnsent _tQ a revision of the canon law to be Cafned into execution by a mixed body of clergy and laity whom the king should appoint. This last concession sealed the fate of the old scientific study of the canon law, which as we have seen, was a distinctly popish study ; and, if it had pot been ac- companied by a limiting clause, allowing the old canons, so far as they were not opposed to the law of the land, to stand until the revision was published, there would have been an entire abolition of ecclesiastical jurisdiction of any kind. In 1535 Cromwell, as the king's vicegerent, visited the two Universities, and in both issued injunctions, that both the old scholastic teaching of the Sentences should cease, and that the teaching in the Decretals and the con- ferring of degrees in canon law should be aboUshed. What