186 THE GREAT STATUTE OF PRAEMUNIRE April me fatal to the notion that it was intended and understood to be a measure of the first importance, protecting against ecclesiastical intrusion the whole field of jurisdiction claimed by the Crown. It is not as if the anti-papal legislation of the period had been a dead letter. The statute of provisors meets one at every turn in the Rolls of Parliament and in the Patent Rolls ; the papal registers, in spite of the pope's attempts to ignore it, betray its effectiveness ; and from time to time it was enforced with much vigour .* The statutes of praemunire of 1353 and 1365 were employed as need arose. There is no greater mistake than to suppose, as some modern historians have done, that the weapons of the Crown against the papacy were allowed to rust unused. This being so, if the statute of 1393 applied to all encroachments of the papacy on the temporal sphere, one would expect it to appear very frequently in the records of the time. A pardon for a breach of the statute of 1390 would be of no avail unless the breach of the statute of 1393 were pardoned too. A licence to accept a papal provision ' notwithstanding the statute of 13 Richard II ' would not protect the provisor against the statute of 16 Richard II. Nevertheless, in the numerous pardons for accepting and licences to accept provisions which are entered in the patent rolls of the twenty years following its enactment it is not once mentioned, while the act of 1390 is repeatedly named as if it were the only one that mattered. 2 Moreover, when Englishmen procured from Rome bulls prejudicial to the Crown, why should laws of Edward III be made the ground of the proceedings taken against them if a more stringent statute of Richard II was equally suited to the case ? But when in 1399 John Bastard, clerk, was pardoned for failing to obey a writ of praemunire facias, his offence of suing divers processes in the Roman court was described as a breach of a statute of Edward III. 3 When in 1415, as we have seen, a writ of praemunire issued against Roger Lansell, it was on the ground that a citation he had pro- cured in the court of Rome was contrary to an ordinance of the same king. 4 In 1427 what was evidently a similar offence was stigmatized in similar terms. 5 And in other cases of unlawful 1 The effect of the statutes of provisors has never been properly investigated. But even a somewhat hasty examination of the calendars of papal registers shows that at various times, especially after the council of Constance, the control of the pope over English preferment became very slight. 2 The statute of 1390 included that of 1351. After 1390 there is little trace of the statute of 1365. Though not formally repealed, it was, as regards papal provisions, superseded by the later act. 9 Cal. of Pat. Soils, 1396-9, p. 544.
- Supra, p. 177. The terms of the reference suggest that the act of 1353 was
meant. It was confirmed in 1365, the statute of 1365 being supplementary to it. 8 Rot. Pat., 5 Hen. VI, fo. 1, m. 3. The abridgement in Cal. of Pat. Rolls, 1422-9, p. 400, mentions the ' statute of praemunire '. The original merely refers to an offence
