Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/289

 8. STUBBS: THE CANON LAW 275 the exact legal force of Cromwell's injunctions was has never been determined ; but in these points they were obeyed : the JLJniversities ceased to teach the systematic theology of the Schools and the systematic jurisprudence of the Decre- tals_i _and^ the ancient degrees of bachelor and doctor of the ^ c anon law ^ rg Jmown, except during the reign of Mary,-ix»" •tQgre. How did this affect the civil law? you ask: well, just as it might be expected ; the scientific study was abolished, the old canons were in abeyance, but the courts continued to practise, the civil law procedure was as lively as ever; and students who intended to practise as advocates took degrees in civil law instead of in both. Oxford dropped the canon law degree altogether ; Cambridge, by adopting a more general form, retained a shadowy presentment of the double honour. And now we come again to an Act which shows the con- tinuity of the inherent rivalry between two systems which, for the sake of mutual profit, had so long worked together. In 1541 a bill was introduced into parliament which enabled married D. C. L.'s to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction as chancellors and commissaries ; it did not pass in that year, being withdrawn on the request of Convocation, but was re- introduced and passed in 1545. So long as the two degrees were granted together, the D. C. L.'s were, as doctors of de- crees, bound by the canon which forbade a married man to act as an ecclesiastical judge; but now the right of the D. C. L. simple, both to marry and to act as a judge, was secured: as the civil doctors of Bologna had done in the thirteenth century, their successors in England now mar- ried; before this they were probably, as a rule, in minor orders. I must pass over the more important of Henry VIII's other acts, especially the Statutes of Appeals and Submis- sion, except just to recall the fact that in the preamble to the former of those Acts passed in 1533 he had expressed himself confident that the realm of England would, as it always had done, provide a sufficient number of spiritual men to decide spiritual questions, and of secular men to decide secular questions, under his own supreme authority