ABSTRACT
The period from the end of the thirteenth to the end of the fifteenth century was a very important one in the history of the relations of church and state in England. It witnessed developments whose cumulative consequence was to establish, by gradual degrees, an effective royal supremacy in the English church long before that supremacy was legally enforced by Henry VIII. The spiritual authority of the pope and the general currency of Roman canon law in England were never challenged in principle, it is true, except by the heretical Lollards, in whose persecution the state took its part. Lyndwood, when he put together his great collection of the provincial constitutions of the English church (completed in 1430) assumed as the basis of their authority their conformity with the general canons of the church. The great volume of correspondence in the Calendars of Papal Letters Concerning England shows that Roman authority permeated the day-to-day administration of the English church at every level. Nevertheless the popes found, and increasingly as our period went on, that the effective exercise of their authority depended almost entirely on the willingness or otherwise of the English monarchs to cooperate and acquiesce in it. As Martin V ruefully put it, ‘it is not the pope but the king of England who governs the church in his dominions.’1
