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On the Medieval National Church
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2009
Extract
That Magna Carta guarantees to every Englishman trial by jury is in some legal circlesan almost inerradicable conviction. As firmly rooted in many ecclesiastical circles is a belief in respect to the first clause of that great document: quod Anglicana Ecclesia libera sit. Though the historical meaning of the phrase is indisputable, it is constantly used in a false sense. It is supposed to have defined a fundamental principle of English ecclesiastical policy although not immediately realized. Just as trial by jury was definitively established only in the contest with the Stuarts, so this great principle of liberty was only secured for the Church at the Reformation; at that time the Anglicana Ecclesia became free and received its birthright assured it in the Charter. This quaint perversion of the meaning of the phrase may in some points be connected with the indisputable fact of the religious and administrative continuity of the Church of England; and the legal status of the modern Church of England has come to be regarded as practically identical with that of the Anglicana Ecclesia contemplated by the Charter. That the libertas electionum, the liberty especially referred to in Magna Carta, has totally disappeared, lost at the Reformation, seems not in the least to have effected the popular ecclesiastical interpretation. But closely connected with that belief as to Magna Carta and the Church is a commonplace of English legal tradition, universal since the sixteenth century, that the Ecchsia Anglicana, which term may be conveniently used throughout this discussion to designate the medieval Church in England as distinguished from the Church in modern times, stood in some exceptional legal relation to the rest of Western Christendom and to the Roman See and that that See had usurped at some time an authority over that Church not recognized either by theChurch or the State. In the exposition of this theory the point is often made that Pope Urban recognized this exceptional position when, according to William of Malmesbury, he introduced Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to a Roman synod as quasi alterius orbis papam.
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References
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