Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE ORIGIN OF THE HIGH COMMISSION First Phase (continued): The Actual Working Of Ecclesiastical Commissions, 1535-80. Until 1565 the chief work performed by these commissions was visitatorial, and their functions, authority, and personnel were dictated largely by expediency. They were intended to cope with such cases as might need the supreme authority of the Crown, and were to lapse as soon as their work was done. Nor can there be much reason to doubt the ubiquity of the Commissioners for the Province of Canterbury from 1549 to 55- While it is impossible to demonstrate definitely what part theyplayed, they probably had a share in everything of importance and in much that was not important. But the growth of such an institution as the Court of High Commission must be sought in the procedure, jurisdiction, personnel of these commissions, rather than in a list of monasteries dissolved, heretics tried, and bishops deposed, even could we positively identify all the cases. We know little of the methods employed by these commissioners. We can often learn what they did, but rarely, if ever, find out anything definite about the way they did it. In the accounts of trials for heresy, no mention is usually made of the authority under which the judge or judges were proceeding, nor of the form and limitations of their commission, nor even whether they sat by commission at all. So many kinds of commissions, general, special, local, and those for the trial of a single case, existed at the same time, and so few details of any heresy proceedings are preserved, that it is practically impossible to distinguish the acts of one from those of another with any approach to certainty. Disciplinary authority over heretics, moreover, was by no means delegated exclusively to commissi…