On the eve of the sixteenth century, sanctuary in England operated under the common law in much the same manner as it had done for centuries. ‘Common’ sanctuaries (a customary right pertaining to all churches and churchyards) permitted felons to seek refuge for a maximum of forty days, before they were either exiled (by availing themselves of the peculiar English custom of ‘abjuring the realm’), or sentenced before the Royal Courts. ‘Private’ sanctuaries (ecclesiastical liberties possessing royal and papal charters endowing them with greater privileges than common sanctuaries), in contrast, could shelter virtually all felons for duration of life. However, in the early-sixteenth century sanctuary’s position under the common law was radically altered, which ushered in the greatest reformation to the privilege since its inception. The majority of these changes were effected within little more than a decade, resulting from the broad and ambitious legislative programme undertaken by the Henrician parliaments of the 1530s. The culmination of sanctuary’s reformation was the act of 32 Hen. VIII c. 12 (hereafter referred to as the act of 1540), which abolished all private sanctuaries and substituted them with eight ‘sanctuary-towns’, in apparent emulation of the six Old Testament ‘Cities of Refuge’. The types of felons who could seek sanctuary after this date were curtailed in a further nod to scriptural precedent. Sanctuary law remained almost completely unaltered thereafter until the first parliament of James I in 1603, before the privilege was abolished entirely in James’s final parliament in 1624. However, according to the corpus of sanctuary scholarship the act of 1540 effected the de facto destruction of sanctuary long before it disappeared from the statute books. For some, the act of 1540 was little more than a concessionary measure in order to placate those who still attached meaning to an archaic, ‘medieval’ privilege, which had no place under the ‘modernising’ Tudors and so was never intended to be practically realised. For others, England’s statutory sanctuary towns were unable to fill the void left by their erstwhile ecclesiastical counterparts for which they substituted. And yet, the act of 1540 and its implementation throughout the remainder of the Tudor period have yet to be subject to a thorough scholarly investigation. This thesis seeks to rectify this omission. It not only asks what the ramifications of the act of 1540 were for sanctuary-seeking throughout the remainder of the Tudor period, but why the act appeared at the time and in the form that it did. To this end, the following Chapters will examine the law of sanctuary from the close of the fourteenth century to the dawn of the seventeenth, utilising a range of central and local record material. Ultimately, this thesis will demonstrate that sanctuary’s practical utility was reduced—but not extinguished—in 1540, and retained a conceptual and practical significance in its new, civic guise. Indeed, sanctuary’s utility would be consistently recognised and reaffirmed throughout the remainder of the sixteenth century, and gradually appropriated into the common law in a manner that precipitated its disappearance under James I.
sanctuary, asylum, refuge, sixteenth-century, Tudor, Cities of Refuge, Inns of Court, Reformation, common sanctuary, private sanctuary, Thomas Cromwell, Westminster Abbey
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