Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/332

 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 continuity 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D.C.L.'s to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction as chancellors and commissaries; it did not pass in that year, being withdrawn on the request of Convocation, but was reintroduced and passed in 1545. So long as the two degrees were granted together the D.C.L.'s were, as doctors of decrees, 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 married; 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 Submission, 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 and to the exclusion of any foreign jurisdiction. The other matters in which those statutes affected ecclesiastical jurisdiction lie somewhat deeper than our present speculations.

We are not however to suppose that, when the king practically abolished the canon law, he intended to hand the clergy over to the common lawyers. The procedure was, as we have seen, still kept in the hands of the civilians; but the theologians were a body of men whose functions had been to some extent usurped by the canonists, and who now for some years, under Tudor and Puritan and Laudian influences, were to come to the front. The theologians or divines divided with the canonico-civilians the authority of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction: the character of a bishop in itself was that of a