I begin this evening with a text rather than a title, though I hope my presentation will be more in the nature of an address than a sermon. And I select this text because I believe it focuses very well and very sharply the sort of concerns which you are to address in your conference over this weekend—Practical Parish Problems: Gospel and Order. For how often have I heard this text trotted out in defence of the people getting on and doing what they want to do without reference to all those interfering lawyers who in any case cost a great deal of money! We are perfectly capable of ordering our own affairs thank you very much they say; why this dead hand of the law as it is perceived, which so often apparently stifles the inspiration and the initiative of the spirit?

I confess that I am not a natural early riser but it is still a great joy for me to celebrate at my parish's 8 o'clock Holy Communion service, especially when the rite is the Holy Communion service from the Book of Common Prayer. I am not saying that I do not enjoy, and do not see the worth of, the rites in the Alternative Service Book, but there is something very special about the rhythms and cadences of the old service and I personally want to see the continuation of all those services contained in the Book of Common Prayer. I therefore want to pose four questions:

(1) How has the Church of England (Worship and Doctrine) Measure 1974 attempted to ensure the continuing availability of the forms of service contained in the Book of Common Prayer?

(2) What are the ‘occasions for which no provision has been made’ embraced by the provisions of Canon B5, para 2?

(3) What, if any, is the legal status of a form of service once, but no longer, authorised?

(4) To what extent does the ecclesiastical law relating to the liturgy bind lay ministers?

I was asked by the Society to provide an introduction to current historical thinking about the English Reformation in the first talk to the 1995 Conference. The ensuing lecture was deliberately intended to provide guidance through the minefield of controversy about the success of Reformation for those with only limited knowledge of sixteenth-century history. Debates about the Reformation have always been of obvious importance to both theologians and historians: they have usually in the past been profoundly influenced by confessional ideologies. In the last thirty years the nature of the questions asked about Reformation has undergone marked change: specifically the issue of popular religious belief and practice has assumed a centrality it never before possessed. But new questions have not brought closer agreement on the nature of religious change, and in recent years fierce debate has continued to rage on such issues as the vitality of late medieval Catholicism, the popularity of the early reformers and the motives of Henry VIII and his successors. Some, at least, of these controversies are still bound up with Protestant, Catholic and Anglican identities in the late twentieth century. Since the continuities between past and present were the theme of last year's Conference, I have touched on these identities, but have left it to others, especially Dr Rowell and Dr Rex to make these connections more explicit.

In the first of the Tracts for the Times John Henry Newman famously posed the question of Anglican Identity, ‘On what ground do you stand, O presbyter of the Church of England?’ He answered his own question in terms of the apostolic commission and succession of the episcopate, and concluded—possibly drawing on what he had learnt from the Evangelical Joseph Milner's Church History, with its high praise of the martyr bishop St. Cyprian as an exemplar for all Christian bishops—that he could wish the episcopate of the Church of England no more ‘blessed termination of their course than the spoliation of their goods and martyrdom’.

Anyone coming across the fourteenth-century church of St Cornelius in Lyndewode, now Linwood, a short distance from the Lincolnshire town of Market Rasen, is struck by its stark isolation—it virtually stands alone in fields. Anyone entering the church will most likely be struck by two interesting objects which have some bearing on this lecture. The first, at the west end of the north aisle, are two fine excellently preserved brasses, both of wool men. They had clearly prospered in the economic development of Lincolnshire in the later middle ages. One of these brasses is of John Lyndwood, who died in 1419, with his wife, four sons and three daughters under smaller canopies. The other represents another John Lyndwood, the son of the former, who died in 1421.

In the July 1995 number of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal, Mr R. H. Bloor presented an interesting account of recent difficulties encountered by the parish church of St Mary's Belton with regard to the chiming of its church clock. In his article, ‘Clocks, Bells and Cockerels’, he took occasion to consider briefly the law relating to bells as a noise nuisance and usefully brought some unreported cases to the attention of readers of the Journal. He did not however consider one question which is, it is submitted, of peculiar importance to ecclesiastical lawyers, a question raised by the present author in a letter to The Times on 22 October 1994, namely whether the obligation of clerics to ring a bell under ecclesiastical and canon law can be a defence to a complaint of nuisance for the noise caused. Nor did he examine the differences which exist, particularly with regard to defences, depending upon whether the complaint is one of public, private or statutory nuisance. The present paper is therefore offered as a discussion of these points and as a wider review of the authorities relating to them.

Scripture refers to an ‘informer’ in the story of the rich man who had a steward, and was told that he was mismanaging his master's resources (Luke 16: 1ff). The Vulgate has hic diffamatus est apud ilium. We hear nothing more about the informer in this parable, or what became of him. He is not reproached for his action.

The historic new LLM degree in Canon Law from the University of Wales College of Cardiff means that there now exists a body of Canon Law graduates, the first ‘home-grown’ canonists in this country since the King's Vicar-General. Thomas Cromwell, suppressed the faculties of Canon Law at Cambridge and Oxford in 1535. It was for a gathering of the first such graduates that the original version of this paper was prepared.

In October 1993, I had to decide whether it was proper for me, as an unbeliever, to go to Parliament to vote in favour of a Church of England measure. Was it proper that laymen, not members of the church, not involved in the decisions taken, should be allowed to sit in Parliament to decide what the law of the church should be? After some discussion, I was persuaded it was proper, and cast my vote accordingly. In that decision, I recognized the triumph of one version of the Royal Supremacy over another. It is the triumph of Christopher St. German over Bishop Stephen Gardiner, of Sir Francis Knollys over Queen Elizabeth I, of Chief Justice Coke over Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and of John Pym over Archbishop Laud. That triumph took a century to arrive after Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, and, like many other triumphs, it threw out a promising baby with its mess of popish bath-water.

Whatever may be thought about the question of the possible disestablishment of the Church of England, there is one premise which the protagonists do not dispute. Nobody doubts that the Church of England is established. Well informed persons also know that, as one aspect of struggling with ‘the Irish question’ in the nineteenth century, the union of the Churches of England and Ireland was dissolved, and the Church disestablished, so far as the island of Ireland was concerned, by the Irish Church Act 1869. Besides, there was disestablishment for the territory of Wales and Monmouthshire by the Welsh Church Act 1914, an Act which is something of a constitutional curiosity: as there is not a separate Welsh legal system, it is very rare for legislation to distinguish between English and Welsh territory, as that Act does.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Doctors' Commons enjoyed a final flowering before its eradication in the 1860s, and its leading members once again achieved a reputation for scholarship and intellectual distinction. Lord Eldon's brother, William Scott (1745–1836), Lord Stowell, undoubtedly bears a considerable part of the credit for raising the public standing of the Civilian profession. Scott was a remarkable man, and his career was not a conventional one. Fellow and Tutor of University College, Oxford, at the age of nineteen—in the very year that his neighbour Blackstone across the High became Vinerian Professor—he was called to the Bar by the Middle Temple the year after taking his D.C.L., and by 1794 was a bencher of his Inn and a distinguished ecclesiastical judge. Yet not only was Dr Scott a Civilian and a barrister, he also taught for several years at Oxford as Reader in Ancient History, and served as a member of Parliament. In law and politics, Stowell shared the conservative instincts of his brother. While professing to value the principle of religious toleration, he was strenuously opposed to Roman Catholic emancipation in Ireland, which he felt would be ‘setting fire to the country’, while in the Commons in 1815 he urged that sectarians should not be excused from contributing to the maintenance of the established Church. In a letter to Joseph Story in 1820 he explained his opposition to all manner of reform, including moderate reform; the latter he considered particularly dangerous, because a modest reform was easily made and then the violent reformers would rush into the breach.

Computers are in use throughout society—collecting, storing, processing and distributing information. Much of that information is about people… ‘personal data’—and is subject to the Data Protection Act 1984.

At the time of the sale of Doctors' Commons in 1865. there were twenty-seven surviving members of the Society of Doctors of Law, some of whom were retired from practice. Five of them (Adams. Deane, Harding, Phillimore and Twiss) had been given silk in 1858, after the loss of their monopoly of audience, and in the case of Dr Adams this set a precedent for granting that rank to a law graduate who was not a barrister. (The precedent was followed in the case of Dr Tristram in 1881.) The other Civilian silks had long before taken the precaution of being called to the common-law Bar—as had fourteen of the twenty-seven advocates mentioned above—and a few were benchers of their inns. Dr Spinks had been admitted and called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1858, but did not take silk until 1866. A partial assimilation had thus began, as a prelude to extinction.