1314 The Bishops of Lichfield, Walter Langton and Hervey Staunton, were appointed to investigate the damage that had occurred in Cambridgeshire due to the failure of the English king's commissioners to conduct the survey properly.
A few years later, Exeter Bishops Walter Stapledon and Robert de Stokheye received a commission to investigate the conduct of hundreds of bailiffs in Somerset, Dorset, Cornwall and Devon .
1340 On 28 April three commissions were announced with the aim of instigating an overhaul of customs officials across the kingdom, the Archbishop of Canterbury to deal with the western ports, Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, appointed to investigate the northern ports, and Henry Burghersh, Bishop of Lincoln, assigned to the eastern ports.
Why are senior clergy involved in these activities? This is a question that is rarely considered, perhaps because the answer is too obvious to warrant detailed investigation. In fact, the reason why bishops are called upon to resolve disputes is simple.
As is easy to see in many of the examples given above, bishops were often appointed to handle cases involving individuals or communities in their parishes, so their involvement reflected a belief that they had the status and authority to restore peace.
There is a view that the royal family used bishops in this way not because they were senior clergy, but because they were powerful landowners, possessing the same influence as secular lords, and because they had an equal responsibility for ensuring that peace was maintained in the territories within their jurisdiction.
On the other hand, there is a symmetry in these committees, which suggests that the selection of personnel reflected a conscious royal effort to mobilize secular and ecclesiastical ministries to provide influence and prestige to the proceedings, in the sense that the ecclesiastical status of the bishop was not accidental and was integral to the functioning of the committees.
Elsewhere, historians have highlighted the pragmatic nature of work in committees, parliaments and councils, Robert Swanson Swanson summed up the situation: "The relationship affecting clergy serving the state was symbiotic, with individuals relying on the crown to secure their careers in the church, just as the crown relied on the church to provide sufficient funds and motivation to continue service."
In other words, clergy served the king as a way to advance their positions, and the crown hired clergy because clergy were cheaper to pay than laity, and because clergy could live in the church with no direct impact on the crown's finances.
There is no doubt that the mutual benefit to be gained from employing clergy in the royal administration was an incentive, but there is also a danger in describing the relationship in such functional terms, where there was no incentive for senior ecclesiastics to participate in royal service.
portrays clergy as single-minded careerists or unwilling state functionaries who offer their services because it is the only path to church politics, and while this may be true for ordinary clergy who aspire to promotion, it is not clear to them how important such considerations are to bishops, who have reached the pinnacle of the church and whose only possibility of promotion lies in transformation into a wealthier and more prestigious curia, the point being that bishops do not have to serve the crown.
Of course, for those people, it cannot be judged whether they were like this because they were driven by the promise of reward because they were burdened with obligations to the king, and perhaps partly because of the favor the king had shown them, because they already had a sense of "civil service" and had served in the government before being promoted to bishops, which brought them material rewards.
One way to shift the focus to a "vocational" perspective is to analyze the principles by which liberal jurisdiction operates, as this reveals a set of assumptions that most clergy, and certainly most university-educated bishops, would strongly subscribe to.
As scholars focus on the Chancery and the development of the concept of equity, it is easy to learn that only in the Chancery are theological principles relevant in a secular legal context.
But in fact "conscience" is part of the ideas and values underpinning natural law , which has been an axiom from the beginning, providing a theoretical and philosophical basis for the operation of free jurisdiction. The reason these connections have not been made before is that legal historians have taken conscience too rigidly as a guiding principle for the operation of discretionary justice.
In fact, "reason" is the word most commonly used by petitioners to conceptualize the authority of petition examiners to arrive at fair and just verdicts. Like conscience, the concept of reason strikes at the heart of natural law.
Thus, in petitions filed throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, it was human nature for the supplicant to hope that the request would be heard or remedied "by reason and the rule of law." Petitioners are well aware that their quest for justice before Parliament or the Lord Chancellor takes them beyond the established limits of the common law and that the resolution of the matter depends entirely on the sound judgment of the person considering the petitions.
This fairness rests on the personal qualities, knowledge, and wisdom of the king and those who deal with these matters, and the rendering of justice in these cases is a matter of discretion, not of statute of limitations.
Natural law and its related concepts of conscience and reason, and even the concept of fairness, are firmly rooted in theological and normative scholarly traditions. Norman Doe provides a summary: "The natural law view holds that the authority of law does not depend entirely on human enactment or use. In the natural law view, human law is also seen as originating in the abstract concepts of God-given morality and deriving authority from them."
Doe illustrates this relationship by drawing on the work of two of the most important legal theorists of the fifteenth century, John Fortescue, the Lord Chancellor, and Reginald Peacock, Bishop of Chichester. Notably, both men serve on parliamentary committees that hear petitions.
Fortescu said: "Natural law is nothing but the eternal law participating in rational creatures." while Peacock declared: "The judgment of reason is the moral law of nature and God."
Fortescu was strongly influenced by the thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, who believed that law was of divine origin and must conform to reason, which figured prominently in his work. The concepts of "reason" and "equity" were as inherent to the operation of ecclesiastical courts as they were to the king's discretionary courts.
They are the guiding principles underpinning canon law and civil law, and will be widely applied by bishops in dealing with diocesan affairs.
Bishops and other senior clergy are therefore invited by the Crown to serve as judges in discretionary judicial cases simply because they are capable servants of the royal bureaucracy, and this discretionary jurisdiction should not be described as an offshoot of the secular legal department .
On the contrary, their participation should be seen as an important prerequisite for the implementation of a form of jurisdiction that acquires legitimacy precisely because it is not secular in nature but operates according to the fundamental precepts of morality and the divine will.
Thus, while statutory law was made by kings and political bodies with popular consent, and common law was a product of judicial will, shaped by legal custom and precedence, discretionary justice was considered an abstract "God created a system of precepts and prohibitions".
As senior figures in the church, bishops are the most qualified people in the kingdom to abide by moral principles besides the king. A natural and obvious requirement of their office is to be able to pronounce judgment on divine authority, and that authority comes from the Bible.
Those who are qualified to read and interpret the Bible are therefore in a particularly advantageous position to understand natural law and the proper application of reason.
It is not difficult to come to the conclusion that the bishops were gradually participating in the royal administration, especially acting as judges who freely adjudicated crimes. When senior clergy sat in conciliation tribunals or parliamentary committees, they understood that they had been fulfilling the role of judges as guardians of the laws and moral principles created by God.
Thus, as Robert Swanson has pointed out, the senior clergy's service to Britain was considered a symbiotic relationship, but this went far beyond a pragmatic calculation of mutual benefit.
From the clergy's perspective, the role played by bishops in exercising prerogative justice on behalf of the king would enhance the relevance and authority of the clergy in society. To some extent, it may also have contributed to the Church of England's concession to the Crown that no clergy should be subject to the jurisdiction of secular courts.
Some of these courts, especially those dealing with civil cases, will be dominated by clergy, and the subordination of the church to secular jurisdiction can be hidden.
From a royal perspective, the placement of bishops at these courts highlighted the Church's divine unity with royal government and added legitimacy and authority to decisions negotiated between individuals and communities.
These views cast new light on the emergence of the Chancery as an equitable jurisdiction in the fifteenth century, for it was the ultimate expression of the mutual interest that existed between church and state in providing discretionary justice.
In Parliament, bishops share responsibilities with the laity and judicial experts, while in the Chancery, the responsibility for providing redress for cases brought by litigants falls entirely on the shoulders of the Chancellor. In the fourteenth century, the Prime Minister's office was dominated by senior clergy, mainly bishops, and by the fifteenth century, more clergy entered the Prime Minister's office.
The development of the office of chancellor is therefore seen as a phenomenon closely related to the ecclesiastical background of the person who held the position. Because of the episcopal control of the chancellery, canonical and civil law rules were applied to proceedings, just as they informed the functioning of ecclesiastical courts.
At the end of the 14th century, the period when clergy began to monopolize the position of chancellor coincided with the period when the chancellor itself became a court and dealt directly with the petitions of the king's subjects. It is arguably no coincidence that as the chancery developed a more clearly independent judicial role, the powers of the chancellor came under increasing scrutiny, particularly from the late fourteenth century onwards, when the House of Commons began to express concern about the possibility of arbitrary judgments by its subjects.
The appointment of high-ranking clergy as ministers was the most effective way to solve the problem of bishops and archbishops being best suited to make judgments based on the principles of natural law and reason, besides the king himself. The ecclesiastical background of a chancellor is therefore crucial to the integrity of the court and its reputation for impartial administration of justice.
To some extent, this view is confirmed by the use of language. At the end of the fourteenth century, in addition to "reason", the term "conscience" began to be used in records. It is important to emphasize that conscience was not a word specifically applied to the Chancellor,
but once the Chancellor began to deal with cases requiring collective discretion, "conscience" had a special resonance with the Chancellor and became part of the Chancellor's petition lexicon after the mid-fifteenth century.
1391 Some petitions submitted to Parliament were referred to the Lord Chancellor, who would provide remedies based on "the authority of Parliament, justice, reason, and the dictates of conscience."
Conclusion
Henry V ordered his ministers to show "all the power of law and conscience" to a supplicant and, at another time, to do "what resonates with conscience."
In an oft-quoted passage from the Chancery Bill introduced in the early fifteenth century, a suppliant asked that his debtor be summoned before the chancellor: "The king's chancellor, the court of conscience, shall answer this question as reason and conscience require."
There is an old Chinese saying that the law has no mercy, and there is also a saying that the law has no mercy and the man has mercy.It can be seen that in the fifteenth century, society at that time had realized that judicial organs could not resort to rigid methods. Rather, discretion is required to deal with the same case in different circumstances.
