The Chancery Court of York: a forgotten jurisdiction ‘particularly circumstanced’?

Doe, Norman ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1464-3130 2025. The Chancery Court of York: a forgotten jurisdiction ‘particularly circumstanced’? Ecclesiastical Law Journal: An international journal for the comparative study of law and religion 27 (3) , pp. 298-316. 10.1017/s0956618x25100872

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Abstract

Today, the Chancery Court is the appeal court for the province of York in the Church of England. There are some excellent specialised period-specific studies which take in the Chancery Court alongside other York church courts, mostly from the Borthwick Institute at York.1 However, there is no book exclusively devoted to the Chancery Court setting out its full history. The court is also rather neglected in standard texts on the history of English ecclesiastical law. Even the great Richard Helmholz has no index entry on it in his monumental history of canon law in England.2 Holdsworth in his well-known history of the common law has a page and a half on courts of the Archbishop of Canterbury; as to York’s archiepiscopal courts, he simply states they ‘corresponded’ to those of Canterbury.3 These are typical of most scholars today.4 This article, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance – to correct what seems to be a case of juridical amnesia and so to unveil the forgotten, or hidden, Chancery Court of York. It offers a short history of the identity, jurisdiction, officers, records and processes, and jurisprudence of the Chancery Court of York. It also points out some key differences between the Chancery Court and its Canterbury equivalent, the Arches Court. The article focuses mainly on its post-Reformation history, as treated in the dispersed secondary literature – and it adds to this what the English ecclesiastical lawyers since the Reformation – civilians, common lawyers, and clerical jurists – say about this York court.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Cardiff Law & Politics
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, Type: open-access
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
ISSN:	0956-618X
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	10 October 2025
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2025 10:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181590

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