History
Secular and Church Courts
Secular and church courts were two distinct legal systems in medieval Europe. Secular courts were responsible for handling civil and criminal cases, while church courts dealt with matters concerning religious law and morality. The relationship between these two court systems often led to conflicts over jurisdiction and authority, with the church asserting its independence from secular control.
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7 Key excerpts on "Secular and Church Courts"
eBook - PDFThe Long Arm of Papal Authority
Late Medieval Christian Peripheries and Their Communications with the Holy See
- Gerhard Jaritz(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Central European University Press(Publisher)
CHURCH AND SECULAR COURTS IN UPPER HUNGARY 175 How this rule was reflected in practice, however, is a subject for further re-search. * * * In conclusion, it seems that both church and town courts claimed jurisdiction in cases where an ecclesiastical person was involved in litigation on a secular mat-ter. The power of the church courts reached its peak in the middle of the thir-teenth century. From then onwards, the kings (Sigismund, Mathias Corvinus and Wladislas II) slowly and gradually limited the jurisdiction of the church courts in favour of the secular courts by exempting some matters from church authority. 41 In general, the kings tried to favour secular courts and limit church jurisdiction. As a result, the number of cases with questionable jurisdiction in-creased and the king had to intervene, as was demonstrated by the examples of conflicts noted above, especially between the town council of Bratislava and the Bratislava chapter. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were many areas where both Secular and Church Courts thought it fit to handle the matter. Similarly, a plaintiff or an accused, if not satisfied with the process or result of a litigation, would not only turn to the local secular authority, but also to church courts and church authorities, sometimes even royal courts and the king, or to the papal Penitentiary, in the hope that these other courts or authorities would be better disposed to his or her interests. — — — — — — — — — — — — 41 Eugen Bidovský, “Orgány stredovekého súdnictva v Uhorsku 1000–1526” [Institutions of medieval judiciary in medieval Slovakia (1000–1526)], Slovenská archivistika 19, n. 2 (1976), 151– 176.
- Munroe Smith(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Columbia University Press(Publisher)
Clerks charged with crime were amenable solely to ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and even civil suits against them were commonly brought in the ecclesiastical courts. Over the laity also the Christian church exercised a very wide jurisdiction, extending over many matters which the Roman law regarded, and modern law again regards, as falling within the exclusive jurisdic-tion of the secular courts. The roots of ecclesiastical jurisdiction are to be found in the Roman Empire. The church had, of course, disciplinary jurisdiction over its clergy and, as it developed a hierarchic organization, this jurisdiction became increasingly effective. In the later Christian period, when a clergyman was charged with crime, the church was usually granted a stay of pro-ceedings in the secular court until the ecclesiastical court had investigated the matter. If chis court found the clergy-man guilty it unfrocked him. He then appeared in the secu-lar court as a layman, and the scandalous spectacle of a clergyman in the dock was avoided. Acquittal by the ec-clesiastical court, however, was no bar to the course of secu-lar justice. In the Frank Empire, after protracted controversy, the church succeeded in withdrawing its clergy from the jurisdiction of the ordinary criminal courts. If the ac-cused person was found innocent, no further proceedings could be taken against him. If, however, he was found guilty, he was delivered to the secular power for punish-ment. Of greater importance was the jurisdiction of the ec-clesiastical courts over the Christian laity. This also had its roots in the Roman Empire, partly in the disinclination of the early Christians to submit their controversies to the A General View of European Legal History 19 heathen courts, but chiefly in the wide jurisdiction assumed by the church over the sins of its members. In the Roman Empire, even after Christianity became the state religion, this jurisdiction was extra-legal.
- Marwan Nader(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Chapter 5Church Courts
In this chapter, I propose to look beyond purely secular Frankish legislation and jurisdiction. There is reason to believe that ecclesiastical institutions played a vital role in defining the status of burgenses and in shaping the terms of borgesie tenure. In the history of the kingdom the Church’s influence was constant. In the eleventh century it had preached to non-feudatories the ideals of armed pilgrimage and remission of the sins of participants. On the First Crusade, at a time when Christian suffering could be interpreted as God’s punishment for men’s immorality, Church leaders helped establish a court to judge acts of impiety. And in the first decades of Frankish settlement, at assemblies such as the one held at Nablus in 1120, churchmen dispensed canons regarding various matters including marriage and miscegenation, for general application in the secular and ecclesiastical courts of the kingdom. In these early years the Church was instrumental in defining the rules under which Europeans were to live and work alongside indigenous Syrians, laying down the principle that Latin Christians were superior to all other religious communities. In its efforts to reinforce the ideals of a middle class composed of Latin Christians with legal privileges and property rights, the Church hoped to encourage the conversion of non-Latin natives to the Catholic faith. From the early existence of the kingdom, moreover, ecclesiastical institutions became wealthy and powerful landowners. Churchmen, such as the bishop of Lydda, were seigneurs justiciers who issued laws over burgesses living in their domains and had their own Cours des Bourgeois . There is reason to believe even, that in the context of burgess jurisdiction, the authority of churchmen extended beyond secular burgess courts. The intention of the following discussion is to demonstrate how the competence of Church courts over burgesses and borgesies in the cities and the Latin rural settlements went beyond the parameters of purely ecclesiastical jurisdiction. These judicial bodies helped uphold burgess written laws and unwritten customs. Richard and others who proposed the theory that in every city and village in the kingdom where there existed a Frankish population there was established a Cour des Bourgeois ,1
eBook - PDF- Ran Hirschl(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
Likewise, courts in so-called C h a p t e r F i v e Courts as Secularizing Agents in the Nontheocratic World Courts as Secularizing Agents in the Nontheocratic World p 163 authoritarian and democratic regimes have common features that are ripe for comparison. Just how different is the secularizing role of constitutional courts and jurisprudence in the nontheocratic, purportedly liberal world from that of constitutional law and courts in predominantly religious settings? In this chapter I examine in detail four illustrations of constitutional entangle-ment with the question of religion in nontheocratic polities: Western Euro-pean courts and the question of religious attire in the public sphere; the struggle for women’s reproductive freedoms in Catholic Latin America; the restrictive interpretation of customary law in South Africa; and the boundaries to accommodation of religion in Canada. These four settings are grouped into two categories. In the first two— Western Europe and Latin America—constitutional courts have emerged as advancing secular or secularizing worldviews and policy preferences, each within its different political context and constitutional legacy. In the latter two settings—South Africa and Canada, arguably two of the most diverse, accommodating polities—constitutional jurisprudence has erected a new wall of separation, permitting diversity and requests for accommo-dation and inclusion of difference while rejecting claims for insulation, if not outright immunization, from the purview of the state’s secular order-ing that are based on adherence to sacred or customary sources of author-ity and identity. These two groups are helpful in understanding the role of constitutional jurisprudence in constitutional theocracy.
- Philippe de Beaumanoir, F. R. P. Akehurst(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
But in such a case the secular justice should help Holy Church, for when someone is condemned as a heretic by the inquisition [examination] of Holy Church, Holy Church should give him over to the secular arm and the secular arm should burn him because the spiritual court should not put anyone to death. Chapter n 119 313. The second case whose jurisdiction belongs to Holy Church is marriage. Such as when a man promises a woman (if Holy Church agrees) to marry her within forty days, if one of them refuses, the other can have them forced into the marriage, unless there is a good cause why the marriage should not take place. And the cognizance of all the cases which can arise from this, both before and after the marriage (and concerning which marriages are to be permitted and which are not), belongs to the bishop; and the secular courts should not get involved. 314. The third case which belongs to the ecclesiastical courts is con-cerning all the property and all the donations [aumosnes] given and donated [aumosnees] and contributed [amorties] to serve and sustain Holy Church, except the cases of temporal jurisdiction and guardianship, which belongs by a general custom to the king and by special custom to the barons in whose baronies the religious houses are founded. And there is no reason why secular justice should not help those who hold the property of Holy Church to defend and safeguard their temporal possessions, so that offend-ers may not do them harm or violence. Nevertheless, they can summon and excommunicate those who offend against them, if those who are sum-moned do not have a good defense. But because the members of Holy Church sometimes think they have a right to certain things to which they have no right,—such as when they sue for some real property which someone is in possession of,—the cognizance belongs to the person from whom the person in possession says he holds the land.
eBook - ePub- John Eekelaar(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Part V The secular state and religious groups 15 Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective R OWAN W ILLIAMS Archbishop of Canterbury This is the complete text of the lecture delivered by the Archbishop of Canterbury at the Royal Courts of Justice on 7 February 2008, under the chairmanship of Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers, the Lord Chief Justice, as the Foundation Lecture in a series of public discussions on ‘Islam in English Law’. 1 The lecture seeks to tease out some of the broader issues around the rights of religious groups within a secular state, using sharia as an example and noting the substantial difference between ‘primitivist’ accounts of sharia and those of serious jurists within Islam. The Archbishop discusses the implications of some interpretations of Western secular legal systems, which seek to remove from consideration the actual religious motivations and practices of groups in plural societies. Where the law does not take religious motivation seriously, then it fails to engage with the community in question and opens up real issues of power by the majority over the minority and thus of community cohesion. It examines whether there should be a higher level of attention to religious identity and communal rights in the practice of the law: how to manage the distinction between cultural practices and those arising from genuine religious belief; and what to do about the possibility that a supplementary jurisdiction could have the effect of reinforcing in minority communities some of the most repressive or retrograde elements in them, with particularly serious consequences for the role and liberties of women
eBook - PDFLaw, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England
Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Brooks
- Michael Lobban, Joanne Begiato, Adrian Green(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
96 At the same time, if, as Selden thought, marriage was essentially a civil contract between two people, then there was no great conceptual leap involved in handling litigation regarding it in the secular courts. Although marital discord resulting in domestic violence had long been heard in the localities by justices of the peace, there were other important issues, such as the questions regarding the validity of marriages made outside the estab- lished church and the enforcement of the payment of alimony in con- nection with marriage breakdowns, which began to come before the royal courts during the interregnum, and some of the issues continued to have an impact in the 1660s and 1670s. 97 The secular-contract view of mar- riage helped to protect Protestant non-conformists from the full impact of legal disabilities that might have fallen on them if their marriages and the legal documents associated with them (marriage settlements, lega- cies) had been invalidated. 98 However, the lapse in the ecclesiastical jurisdiction may also have disadvantaged married women by leading common law judges to invest more authority in husbands as heads of their households. 99 95 Helmholz, Canon Law and Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction, pp. 308–309, describes the atrophy, but many of the details of the consequences remain to be worked out in detail. 96 C. Kitching, ‘Probate during the civil war and interregnum, part I: the survival of the prerogative court in the 1640s’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 5 (1976), 283–293; C. Kitching, ‘Probate during the civil war and interregnum, part II: the court for probate, 1653–1660’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 6 (1976), 346–356. Reformation in Courts and Cases Testamentary (1650), which is attributed to Henry Parker, makes the case for the creation of a secular registry. Much of the litigation connected with wills, as opposed to their enrolment, was already being handled by the secular courts.
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