Notes from the Ecclesiastical Court Records at Somerset House

Abstract

When I had the honour of being invited to read a paper before this Society on the above-mentioned records, I hesitated to accept, but the consideration that for the last 60 or 70 years these records have been practically inaccessible to students prevailed. Only quite recently, however, following upon a request made to the President of the Probate and Divorce Division to allow a particular series amongst them to be consulted, this position has been somewhat modified. Some of the cases quoted in this paper may in consequence be already familiar to my audience. The recent publication of Miss Eleanor Trotter's Seventeenth Century Life in a Country Parish, taken, it is true, chiefly from the records of the Quarter Sessions which dealt with certain cases instituted in the first instance in an Ecclesiastical Court, has given us a picture of social parish life more vivid and illuminating than any I can hope to conjure up as the result of these researches. The records I propose to treat of in this paper have their counterpart in almost all of the Episcopal and Archidiaconal Courts in England. The form of procedure in all is practically identical, but the historical interest of the records preserved in Somerset House is, I venture to think, somewhat greater. Under Section 89 of the Court of Probate Act of 1857, the Judge of the Probate Court had power to requisition from Ecclesiastical custody any books wholly or mainly of a testamentary nature, and under Section 66 of the Divorce Court Act 1857, the Secretary of State had power to requisition all matrimonial records.