Church, State, and Reformation: the use and interpretation of praemunire from its creation to the English break with Rome

This thesis examines the use and interpretation of praemunire from its fourteenth-century creation to the English break with Rome. Although much has been written on praemunire in the Tudor period, when Henry VIII and Thomas Wolsey used the offence to intimidate their rivals in the years preceding the break with Rome, little work has been done on the offence in the century-and-a-half before this date. The central point of this thesis is to connect the creation of the offence of praemunire in the fourteenth century to this sixteenth-century use, to see how it changed from an offence designed to protect both the ecclesiastical and temporal spheres in England from an encroaching papacy, to one that could bring low the mightiest of England’s churchmen. As this thesis deals primarily with how the offence changed over time, the chapters follow a broadly chronological structure. Chapters one to three look at the fourteenth-century creation of the writ of praemunire facias, the Statutes of Praemunire, and the offence of praemunire that they created. Chapters four and five look at the spiritual responses to the offence in the fifteenth century. Chapter four looks at the papal reactions to praemunire and the ostensibly similar provisors legislation. Chapter five looks at the contemporary records of convocation to measure English ecclesiastical opinion of praemunire in the fifteenth century. Chapter six look at the legal interpretation of the offence, from the deposition of Richard II to the accession of Henry VII, to see how the offence was confirmed as one that could be used against the English ecclesiastical courts. Finally, chapters seven and eight examine the use of praemunire in the Tudor period, and reassess the high-profile events in the sixteenth century based on this new understanding of praemunire.