Cannons and Constitutions

This chapter argues that the polemical reaction to the Canons of 1640 offers a number of clarifications of the problem, which contemporaries recognised as stemming from the legal and political legacies of the Reformation. The outcry over the illegalities associated with the Caroline Church drew on a deeper problem concerning the relationship between the laws of the Church and the laws of the realm. It explores aspects of this problem by way of a close reading of a singular contribution to the debate over the Canons. The chapter is based on the Library of York Minster and the Rare Books Room of the Cambridge University Library. The Canons were clearly seen as an attempt to exclude Parliament from the governance of the Church, and to establish in the court of High Commission a jurisdiction that denied to the King his power over the ecclesia, and the common law its proper jurisdiction over the liberty and property of subjects.