The first post-Reformation English canonist in our series seems, on the face of his curriculum vitae a very different kind of lawyer from the medieval writers previously described. He was not a doctor of law, and seems to have spent a mere three years at university. He went up to Oxford as a relatively mature student (in his early 20s) in 1576, having already served an apprenticeship as clerk in the registar's office at York and having become a notary public and actuary of the Consistory Court in the early 1570s. He was a local boy, born and educated in the city of York, and came to the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities as a promising clerk at about the age when more fortunate youngsters were sent to Oxford or Cambridge. Swinburne's study therefore began in the office, and in the routines of clerical writing: a preparation which, in other spheres of law also, could prove as valuable as college life for the true scholar.

The Court of Arches is the Archbishop's court of appeal for the Province of Canterbury. It derives its name from the church of St. Mary-le-Bow or St. Maria de Arcubus in the city of London where the court was held from at least the primacy of Archbishop Pecham (1279–92) until the church was destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. The church was one of thirteen in the City of London which, before the abolition of peculiars in the middle of the nineteenth century, came within the Archbishop's jurisdiction of the deanery of the Arches. The judge or Official Principal who presided over the Court of Arches came to be known as the Dean of the Arches from his lesser office as judge of the court of the peculiar.

Most clerics of the Church in Wales will be aware that many people on the fringe of Church life will describe themselves as belonging to the Church of England, rather than as members of the Church in Wales. A Welsh hospital chaplain recently issued a circular requesting that Anglican patients entering hospital should describe themselves as members of the Church in Wales rather than of the Church in England. Seventy and more years after the disestablishment of the Church in Wales there is thus confusion in the minds of many about the identity of the Church in Wales. Is it, or is it not, part of the Church of England? But if there is confusion in the minds of some about the identity of the Church in Wales, there is equal confusion about its status. What does it mean to belong to a disestablished Church? What does it mean to be a disestablished Church?