Ecclesiastical Prisons and Royal Authority in the Reign of Henry VII

Abstract

After his appointment as chief justice of King's Bench in 1495, John Fyneux pressured the ecclesiastical hierarchy through indictments for escapes which explored which officials had responsibility for the prisons and how they were managed, and thereby successfully asserted the royal right of oversight. By the end of Henry VII's reign his bishops, faced with ruinous fines like other lords, had largely accepted their role as gaolers under royal authority, and thus contributed to the bureaucratisation of the hierarchy which Henry VIII would exploit to such good effect.

Peine Forte et Dure: The Medieval Practice

“…95 Those in bishops' prisons were also regularly shackled, and there does not seem to have been an ecclesiastical version of a sewet, that is, a fee paid in the king's prisons to have those shackles removed. 96 These deprivations were not reserved solely for those sentenced to perpetual penance; indeed, they were shared also by the clergyman who was delivered to the ordinary as clericus convictus, that is a convicted clerk, having been tried by a jury in the king's courts and found guilty. Because clergymen were bound to be tried by the ordinary at a specially constituted ecclesiastical tribunal, the secular verdict was not considered valid.…”