Schedule 1 to the Juries Act 1974 provides that ‘[a] man in holy orders; a regular minister of any religious denomination [and] [a] vowed member of any religious order living in a monastery, convent or other religious community’ is ineligible to serve on a criminal (and also a civil) jury. This has been the law since 1972. For the remainder of this century members of the clergy have been eligible, but not compellable, jurors. In practice they did not serve. The change effected in 1972 is a reversion to the position which probably prevailed in the Middle Ages. Aside from the occasional official report, the liability of religious functionaries to serve on juries in criminal trials has been rarely written about. The last time it happened was in 1882. The object of this article is to fill the lacuna by tracing the history of the clergy's ineligibility for jury service in criminal trials and the reasons for it.

Two main functions are performed by the consistory court. The first is the discipline of clergy which is presently the subject of a wholesale review by General Synod following the recommendations of the Hawker Report and has been the subject of much comment, not least in the pages of this Journal. At the time of writing, a draft Measure is still awaited. The second main function is the exercise of the faculty jurisdiction in relation to church buildings, their contents and their surroundings. Central to the effective exercise of this jurisdiction is the ecclesiastical exemption—a pragmatic ‘stand-off’ between central government and certain Christian denominations whereby listed church buildings are not subject to the secular sytem of listed building consent or conservation area control by local authorities. This too has been the subject of recent review. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the consistory court in faculty matters and to contribute to the debate which the Newman Report will doubtless engender. The views expressed are, of course, my own and not those of the Ecclesiastical Law Society or any other body.

The Church was not founded at Pentecost, as is sometimes said, but by Christ during the course of his ministry in Galilee and Judea. It was he who appointed the twelve to become what today, perhaps, would be called teaching officers, and who commissioned the seventy as a corps of evangelistic missioners. In the ancient world religious knowledge was sometimes committed to sacred writings, sometimes to a school of ideas, sometimes to a priestly caste or an assemblage of cultic observances, and sometimes it emerged episodically through the translations of oracles. Christ, in contrast, revealed his truth to a living company of people—‘the People of God—who, after his corporeal departure, became his body on earth. Precisely because the message was thus conveyed organically it remained permanently new: able to adapt to changing intellectual modes and social filtration, capable of bringing forward fresh insights in the successive cultural shifts of a progressive humanity. Written texts do not transmit truth of themselves: they require re-interpretation, over long periods of time, if they are to achieve durable meaning. Priestly castes have the disadvantage of imploding into small coteries of exclusivity; they frequently become a mere adjunct of ruling elites. Philosophical systems tend to die when the surrounding culture to which they originally related transforms itself or disintegrates. But a living body of people, at the centre of whose religious insights is not a set of ideas but a person, has the verifiable capability of enduring through the centuries, forever changing yet forever the same.

This paper had its origin in an excursus to the dissertation offered in part requirement for the University of Wales LLM degree in Ecclesiastical and Canon Law. Like all work on Colenso, it is indebted to the magisterial investigations of the late Peter Hinchliff, in whose biography of Colenso will be found an extensive bibliography to 1964. Later sources are itemised in this paper.