Ecclesia Anglicana, cui Ecclesiastes noster Christus vos prefecit: the power of the crown in the English Church during the Great Schism

Abstract

Why, at the Reformation in England, did the king rather than the archbishop of Canterbury become head of the church? Why, with so little distress, did the English accept an autonomous national church? To a medievalist such a development seems startling. Though late medieval kings might manipulate the appointment of bishops or regulate provisions they did not dictate to their subjects what constitutes Christian faith or practice. Late medieval churchmen did not believe in autonomous national churches but in a body whose visible institutional unity is linked with obedience to the pope, and in theory it was scandalous when in the Great Schism individual rulers decided for their subjects which pope was to be obeyed or became neutral. In late fourteenth century England only a tiny minority of lollards would have dispensed with the papacy and all other solutions to the schism intended to restore the system, not to abandon it.