Note 1012 — INDEX.

Footnote 1012: This was part of the revived influence of the Roman Civil Law in England which Professor Maitland has sketched in his English Law and the Renaissance, 1901. But the influence of these ideas extended into every sphere, and not least of all into the ecclesiastical. Englishmen, said Chapuys, were fond of tracing the King's imperial authority back to a grant from the Emperor Constantine—giving it thus an antiquity as great and an origin as authoritative as that claimed for the Pope by the false Donation of Constantine (L. and P., v., 45; vii., 232). This is the meaning of Henry's assertion that the Pope's authority in England was "usurped," not that it was usurped at the expense of the English national Church, but at the expense of his prerogative. So, too, we find instructive complaints from a different sort of reformers that the reformation as effected by Henry VIII. was merely a translatio imperii (ibid., XIV., ii., 141). Henry VIII.'s encouragement of the civil law was the natural counterpart of the prohibition of its study by Pope Honorius in 1219 and Innocent IV. in 1254 (Pollock and Maitland, i., 102, 103).(back)