On 14 November 1279 King Edward I issued the Statute of Mortmain. The statute prohibited all future alienations in mortmain in England, which meant any permanent grant of land or any other form of real property (such as a rent or the advowson of a church) to religious houses or any other kind of ecclesiastical office-holder (including bishops, rectors of parish churches and chantry priests). Any breach of this prohibition was to render the property liable to forfeiture. The immediate lord of whom the property was held was given a year to take possession of it for himself. If he failed to act, each of the superior lords of the property between the immediate lord and the king in the tenurial hierarchy was to be allowed six months in turn to take possession of it. Somewhat confusingly, however, the statute also stated that after the first year had elapsed the king might take possession, but that he had immediately to regrant the land to a new lay tenant to hold of the original lord for the original services plus new services to the king. Despite some confusion in detail on this last point, the statute seems clear on the general principle. Alienations in mortmain were henceforth to be illegal. The practice was, however, somewhat different. Alienations in mortmain did not cease after 14 November 1279 but they did come to be subject to a complex and bureaucratic licensing system. Surviving governmental records of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries allow us to trace the creation and modification of a classic system of ‘red tape’ that from an early stage controlled not just the acquisition of property by the church, but even the transfer of property from one ecclesiastical property-owner to another and the appropriation of a church by the holder of its advowson.

The easiest part of the system to trace from the published calendars of chancery rolls is the final stage of the process, the issuing of licences by the king’s chancery to grant and acquire property in mortmain. The first of these was issued within six months of the publication of the statute.