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Updated: June 20, 2025
Those of Provisors and Præmunire settled the relations of England to the Roman Court. That of Treason in 1352 defined that crime and its penalties. That of the Staples in 1353 regulated the conditions of foreign trade and the privileges of the merchant gilds which conducted it.
In his time, also, a layman was for the first time appointed to the office of Chancellor, and Edward III. wrote a letter to the pope protesting against the frequent papal nominations to vacant English sees, which was followed up by the Statute of Provisors in 1350. Stratford died at Mayfield in Sussex, and was buried in his own cathedral, where his monument still remains.
But as a matter of fact, lest their acceptance of such a measure might be misunderstood, the English bishops offered the most strenuous opposition to the Statute of Provisors and insisted that their protests against it should be registered, a policy which, it might be added, was followed by the University of Oxford. The bishops demanded later on that it should be repealed.
The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Præmunire statutes, which, forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have been usually considered in the highest degree oppressive; and more particularly the public censure has fallen upon the last application of those statutes, when, on Wolsey's fall, the whole body of the clergy were laid under a præmunire, and only obtained pardon on payment of a serious fine.
The laity were sustained in vigour by the practical obligations of life; the clergy sunk under the influence of a waning religion, the administration of the forms of which had become their sole occupation; and as character forsook them, the Mortmain Act, the Acts of Premunire, and the repeatedly recurring Statutes of Provisors mark the successive defeats that drove them back from the high post of command which character alone had earned for them.
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