Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The importance of the Supplication in the religious changes of the next decade cannot be over-estimated. The ‘Ordinaries’ under attack were the bishops and their senior officials, controlling the entire system of Church courts, whose procedures were those of the Western Church’s international system of canon law. Their activities ran in parallel with the business transacted in an intricate variety of temporal law courts which made up the King’s judicial jurisdiction, and which operated England’s unique legal system of royal writ and precedent dating back to the twelfth century – the common law. If things were going well, Church courts complemented common law courts. If things were going badly, the two systems became rivals, with little parallel elsewhere in Europe. All medieval legal jurisdictions were liable to clash and try to steal each other’s business, but nowhere else was there a contest of two such giants. English common law was unique because no other kingdom or sizeable principality in Europe had such a long tradition of centralized administration as England. Over four centuries, English monarchs had created royal courts whose practices in turn fostered a brotherhood of lawyers to run them, with their own system of higher education as a complete alternative to Oxford and Cambridge: the Inns of Court in London. Common law thus created a second English learned profession alongside the clergy, boasting its own traditions, training and esprit de corps, a profession wh...