This thesis demonstrates that I have provided a sustained, original, coherent, and significant contribution to scholarly research on benefit of clergy as it transitioned from ecclesiastical use to temporal during the late middle ages and how once secularized was subsequently adopted and used in colonial Virginia and Massachusetts.
The Introduction argues that whereas benefit of clergy existed in the English-speaking world for almost fifteen hundred years it has been largely dismissed as evil, a farce and a queer old legal anomaly. At its worst it permitted members of the church immunity from prosecution before secular courts for the crimes of murder, robbery, rape and a suite of other felonies. At its best it saved women, children and the poor from the gallows for the most minor of thefts. I argue that the life and history of benefit of clergy is a fascinating and important insight into the development of the common law and the relationship that members of the church had with the society they served. Over time the benefit became available to first time offenders regardless of their station in society in exchange for a sentence of transportation to the American colonies. The criminal courts of England attached an indentured servitude to benefit pleas resulting in thousands of men and a few women and children being sent to Virginia to service the labor pool needed to make Virginia the financial success its London backers had hoped for. Within a short period of time benefit of clergy became an established part of the legal system of the colony to the extent that it was possible to claim benefit of clergy in Virginia and be transported away to the West Indies. Further north the motivation for colonization differed. The early arrivals to Massachusetts were familiar with benefit of clergy but their enthusiasm for wholesale adoption of English common law was tepid. Notwithstanding these reservations the practicality of having a mitigatory plea that was known to all members of the community meant that the written law could appear to embrace religious severity but in practice could be applied with leniency when appropriate.
The Critical Essay demonstrates my contribution beyond what has previously been offered. Prior to my works there was one scholarly book dedicated to the topic of benefit of clergy. Leona Gabel’s 1923 doctoral thesis was published in 1928 as Benefit of Clergy in England in the Later Middle Ages. Since her work there have been a couple of dozen scholarly articles and an entertaining unreferenced read by George Dalzell, Benefit of Clergy in America published posthumously in 1955. I have made a unique contribution in bringing the related legal options to claim sanctuary, abjuration, exile and outlawry into the benefit of clergy discussion. Also, I have argued that it is vital to an informed understanding of the uptake and use of benefit of clergy in colonial America that the history of the arguments that took place in England during the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are explored to appreciate why transported felons would adopt and apply clericus in such different worlds as existed in Virginia and Massachusetts.
The Critical Essay does not attempt to explain or utilize primary sources in theology. Nor does it seek to interpret theoretical canon law from the period. Through the use of case examples my work takes a case based approach to describe the social setting of benefit of clergy throughout this period of history. By examining examples of benefit of clergy use and abuse a better understanding may be gained of the socio-legal world of the late Middle Ages which will help locate privilegium fori as an organic privilege that shifted from ecclesiastical exclusivity to secular adoption. It attempts to explain that benefit of clergy, though much and inexcusably abused, was not exceptional, rather the opposite. Clericus began as a plea available to a few select men who had a particular status in society. This of itself is not unusual. Over time the advantages of having immunity from certain sanguinary remedies became clear to an audience far greater than just England’s clergy. Defending benefit of clergy as an exclusive ecclesiastical privilege became impossible because of its wholesale abuse. Eventually it would have to have been rescinded by the secular law or adopted. It was modified, adopted and then lived on for another five hundred years in consistently changing applications. A life of five hundred years is much more than a legal farce. It is a statement of societal growth. Of the clericus plea there is little scholarly pusillanimity but it tends to follow one track; benefit of clergy was a farce, a legal fiction. I reject this interpretation and my Critical Essay provides an alternative and plausible history.

The secularization of ecclesiastical privileges in medieval England and their subsequent adoption and use in Colonial America1066-1766

The twelfth-century borderlands of the duchy of Normandy formed the cockpit for dynastic rivalries between the kings of England and France. This 2004 book examines how the political divisions between Normandy and its neighbours shaped the communities of the Norman frontier. It traces the region's history from the conquest of Normandy in 1106 by Henry I of England, to the duchy's annexation in 1204 by the king of France, Philip Augustus, and its incorporation into the Capetian kingdom. It explores the impact of the frontier upon princely and ecclesiastical power structures, customary laws, and noble strategies such as marriage, patronage and suretyship. Particular attention is paid to the lesser aristocracy as well as the better known magnates, and an extended appendix reconstructs the genealogies of thirty-three prominent frontier lineages. The book sheds light upon the twelfth-century French aristocracy, and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of medieval political frontiers.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/71722/frontmatter/9780521571722_frontmatter.pdf

The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries

The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries: Genealogies

CUSTOMS AND FRONTIERS One of the most marked features of Normandy in the later Middle Ages was the Coutume de Normandie, which in many ways came to embody the identity of the province after 1204. In 1315, for instance, it was the provincial privileges of Normandy that Louis X confirmed in the Charte aux Normands . Historians have often taken the customs of Normandy as an embodiment of the province's precocious distinctiveness: ‘crystallised’ at an early date and henceforward conservative, inward-looking and inflexible, the customs are believed to have altered little between the end of Plantagenet rule and the end of the Ancien Regime itself. The most prolific of all historians of Norman law, Jean Yver, characterised the customs of Normandy, along with the other systems of western France, as distinguished by their feudalisation, conservatism and preservation of lineage. For Yver and other historians of Norman law, the customs were primarily a legacy of the ducal era and were infused with ducal authority. This supposedly distinctive character of Norman customary law imbues the Norman frontier with great significance, for it implies that the borders of the duchy, especially the eastern frontier with Francia , represented a great legal divide. To Lemarignier the contrast between the unitary customs of Normandy and the hotchpotch of surrounding systems of law was one of the most important characteristics of the Norman frontier. The customs of Normandy also have a great relevance for the Norman frontier in basic territorial terms.

The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries: The customs of Normandy and the Norman frontier

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER FOR NORMAN GOVERNMENT The twelfth century was a pivotal period for the development of systems of government in western Europe. These changes have been characterised variously as the ‘rise of administrative kingship’, or, by the historian of the county-bishopric of the Beauvaisis, to the east of Normandy, as a ‘new mode of exercising power’. For another distinguished historian of twelfth-century France these changes signified the beginnings of the retreat of ‘lordship’ in the face of ‘government’, although the practices and structures of lordship were too entrenched to be overthrown completely, and in many respects the French principalities are best viewed as lordships writ large. Characteristic developments included the growing use of written records and revocable offices which could hold officials more accountable, the rise of extraordinary taxation such as scutages, tallages and aids, and the increasing recourse to more rational judicial methods. The duchy of Normandy appears to have been at the forefront of these developments. By the death of Henry I in 1135, its administration was noticeably more sophisticated than that of most other French principalities, even though it was still more primitive than in Normandy's great colony of England. Some developments arose in parallel with their better-known English counterparts, or were borrowed directly from England after 1066. The Anglo-Saxon writ, for instance, became a major tool of Norman administration in the twelfth century.

The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries: The dukes of Normandy and the frontier regions

Richard Lionheart's historical reputation is primarily that of a warrior kingrex iWle bellicosus in one English chronicler's words-yet recent scholarship has sought to place the English ruler in the context of "administrative kingship."' Previous tests of Richard's personal involvement in governing his domains have concentrated on his kingdom of England, neglecting his Continental domains (with the exception of Normandy to some extent). The survival of masses of administrative records from medieval England makes it easier to evaluate the Lionheart's personal role in government there than in his Continental domains, which generated far fewer records, and historians have failed to extend their evaluation of Richard as an administrative monarch to his father's patrimony in the Loire River valley or to his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine's inheritance farther south. Indeed, no administrative records earlier than the Capetian take-

Richard Lionheart and the Episcopate in His French Domains

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Richard Lionheart and the Episcopate in His French Domains