With Church Courts and the People in Seventeenth-Century England (also available for free download from the UCL website), Andrew Thomson joins the long and growing list of scholars who have used the records of English ecclesiastical courts to examine aspects of everyday life, religion, and/or the functioning of the Church of England as an institution. Thomson's work is decidedly focused on the last of these, although he does occasionally discuss issues of popular religiosity. This is primarily an institutional history of the church courts across the seventeenth century, drawing on sample years (or spans of years) from records of the courts in three dioceses—Winchester, Worcester, and Wells.
Thomson's earlier work on the Church in the diocese of Winchester before and after the civil wars is here expanded to include comparisons to the other two dioceses. To create some comparative consistency, he has sampled Michaelmas (November) sittings of the courts of the three dioceses for various years in the 1610s and 1620s as well as in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s (albeit relying on the records of the Hilary sitting in 1663 in Wells due to poor record survival). Then, in the book's penultimate chapter Thomson does a deep dive into the records of Worcester, including a complete run of them from 1690 to 1697, although in these, and for another seven-year run from 1611 to 1618, he restricts himself to three of the eight deaneries in the diocese to ensure a manageable body of records with which to work. Throughout the book he focuses on ex officio cases—usually cases of misbehavior or neglect of responsibilities prosecuted by diocesan officials—and not private instance cases such as disputes over wills, libel, or breach of promise, which were essentially private suits. Those summoned ex officio included private individuals as well as clergy or churchwardens charged with not carrying out their responsibilities.
Thomson's sampling, while certainly justifiable, can also be frustrating since few individual cases are followed all the way through to completion. When Thomson notes that the rate of unresolved cases was never below sixty-three percent anywhere in his sample (100), this may seem like an indictment of the effectiveness of ecclesiastical justice, but is it possible that a significant number of those unresolved cases were carried over to later terms? Thomson suggests that some may have been settled privately, but he does not discuss whether cases were carried over. It also appears that Thomson has omitted certain unusual charges against the clergy from his statistics due to their “exceptionality,” such as the case of a rector fighting with his wife in the chancel, which seems odd (70–71). The statistics themselves are all in appendices, which may be handy for reference purposes, but then Thomson discusses and describes them in prose in the various chapters of the book, and those discussions can be hard to follow if the reader doesn't have the tables in front of them.
Despite those caveats, Thomson is certainly able to trace some changes over time, and the story he tells is generally one of decline, as English church courts lost a great deal of authority over the course of the seventeenth century, a decline perhaps similar to that of the institution of which they were part. While the religio-political cataclysms between 1640 and 1660 brought some of the more dramatic blows, it does not appear that the church courts enjoyed particularly high rates of compliance in the 1610s or 1620s either. In discussing the decline in illegitimate birth rates over the course of the seventeenth century, which has been found by Peter Laslett, Keith Wrightson, and others, Thomson dismisses the possibility that diocesan courts played a role in this because “they were feeble, toothless bodies which proved unable to summon people or to complete business and, if the Church enjoyed any success at all, it may have been through its other agencies” (111). In this respect Thomson seems remarkably modest in downplaying the importance of the very institutions he is studying. Ecclesiastical justice in peril indeed! Much of what had been the business of church courts, such as vagrancy, religious nonconformity, and births out of wedlock, was passed over to secular courts in the wake of the Restoration. The foray into the “Reformation of Manners” that Thomson finds the courts of Worcester diocese making in the 1690s seems almost an effort to justify their continuing existence, particularly in light of de facto religious toleration after the Revolution of 1688–89 (which Thomson archaically refers to as the “Glorious Revolution” without the use of any quotation marks). Thomson seems very well-acquainted with the uses that other scholars of seventeenth-century England have made of church court records, and does not really disagree with what those scholars have found. But given that other kingdoms and territories (including England's near neighbor to the north) had networks of church courts whose records historians have used extensively, it is surprising to see no comparisons to anything outside of England offered here.
Early in this book Thomson quotes G. R. Elton as having written in the source guide England 1200–1640 (1969) that the act books of the English Church courts were “strikingly repulsive” and should only be used by younger scholars with physical strength and “strong indigestion” (6). In fact, the word Elton used was “digestion,” and there is no doubt that Thomson has digested a lot of material for us. But the story that he tells of the decline of these courts over the course of the seventeenth century would no doubt have given William Laud and even his more purely Calvinist colleagues indigestion had they lived long enough to read it.
