The Gentry and the Church

Abstract

Sir Henry Spelman, the great legal historian, was in some ways a characteristic learned gentleman of the early seventeenth century. He exchanged notes and writings on heraldry with his fellow antiquaries, participated efficiently, if not vigorously, in the political affairs of his county of Norfolk, and sat as an MP in the Parliaments of 1597 and 1625. Like many of his contemporaries, Spelman was also involved in much litigation for the preservation of his estate, including long and bitter conflicts about his claim to property formerly held by the abbeys of Blackborough and Wormegay. The dispute ground through Chancery for two decades until it was finally compromised by Lord Keeper Coventry. And there the matter would probably have ended had the antiquary not been in other ways a very untypical gentleman. Instead he expressed relief to be ‘out of the briars’, but drew from his experiences the unusual conclusion that he had been taught ‘the Infelicity of meddling with consecrated places’. From this beginning Spelman began to accumulate evidence of the disastrous effect that possession of former Church property had had on the families of his native county, evidence that was published long after his death in The History and Fate of Sacrilege. An interim statement of his views on sacrilege did, however, appear in 1613 in De non temerandis Ecclesiae.¹