Until quite recently, the study of the legal history of the Church of England was something of a Cinderella subject, overlooked by the vast majority of clergy, theologians and church historians. Canon law itself is a matter hardly likely to attract the enthusiasm of most ordinands, and scarcely taught in theological colleges and courses, except perhaps in passing in pastoral and practical theology. Yet clergy and church officers ignore it at their peril, needless to say. Moreover, the development of church law, and of the whole paraphernalia of statutes, measures, courts and legal officers that sustains it, is intrinsically enmeshed in the institutional apparatus of the Church, and grounded in its theological convictions. In recent decades there has been a determined revival in its study and teaching, encouraged above all by the remarkable career of Professor Norman Doe and the Cardiff Centre for Law and Religion. Many of the contributors to this outstanding new book of essays on the legal history of the Church of England are graduates of the Centre, and mentees of Norman Doe. It was prompted by the Church Law History Consortium, an offshoot of the Cardiff Centre, which began meeting only in 2022; to publish this volume already is a major achievement for the editors and authors.

What they have produced is a survey of the Church of England’s history from the Reformation onwards, traced through the development of its law and its legal institutions and principles. Eleven chapters, with an Introduction and Conclusion, cover 500 years, with a quite technical preliminary chapter by Sarah White on ‘The Medieval Antecedents’. Her task was a tall order – the development of the whole structure of medieval canon law in a mere 22 pages – but she fulfils it magnificently. The contributors are a mix of legal specialists, and theologians and historians with a ‘sideline’ in canon law, but it is a successful combination, and the editors are to be commended for exercising control and general consistency throughout the volume. The familiar is well represented here: the Henrician statutes that brokered the Reformation in England, the messiness of subsequent development after the switchback reigns of Edward and Mary, with unfinished business in the reform of canon law, the legal chaos of the mid-seventeenth century, then the conflicts and reform of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and finally the revision of canon law completed under Geoffrey Fisher (a project significantly undervalued even today). But so is the less familiar – the contentious relationship between canon and civil law, the development and near-eclipse of the profession of canon lawyers, the arguments of legal philosophers and jurists, and the fluctuating fortunes of the church courts. All of this gets due attention.

In a composite volume, it is hardly surprising that there is no single, over-arching interpretation, unless you single out the very general point that the legal history of the Church of England deserves careful and patient exposition. Two distinct tensions run through the chapters, nonetheless. One is between a narrative history of legislation, on the one hand, and an analytic history of structures and principles on the other. The second is between a broader history of the Church illustrated from particular legislative initiatives, and a more tightly focused history of particular legal precepts and practices. Evidently these tensions overlap, but it would be true to say that the essays show a variable degree of engagement with them, whilst none overall altogether loses sight of any of them. Contrast, for example, Ian Blaney’s chapter on ‘The Source and Limit of the King’s Ecclesiastical Law: 1603–60’, which really is an illuminating discussion of church courts’ practice, jurists’ arguments, and canon law, but which tends to push the precipitate collapse of royal and ecclesiastical order in the late 1630s and 1640s somewhat into the background, with Paul Barber’s and Morag Ellis’s chapter on the Elizabethan Settlement, which has a more conventional narrative framework hinging on specific individuals and events. All the chapters are of an extremely high standard, and some variation in approach is to be expected from an edited collection. It is, though, testimony to the importance and complexity of the subject matter that even this volume by a team of specialists leaves this reader thinking that there is a great deal more to be said.

There are minor irritations. They include the over-use of the historic present by some authors. There are quite a few minor typos. A glossary would have been a kindness: sometimes technical terms are used without explanation, such as feoffments (p 67), cy-près (p 109), proprio vigore (p 132), and duplex querela (p 156). Yes, readers can look these terms up elsewhere, but it would have been helpful to have had an explanation in the book itself. Likewise, a table of abbreviations would have saved a lot of scurrying through footnotes to find the original reference. Occasionally contributors do not seem sufficiently aware of recent scholarship. Can one seriously maintain now, for example, that Owen Chadwick’s Victorian Church (1966–70) is the ‘classic’ study of the period (p 153)? For all its magisterial and literary qualities, it was seriously deficient in its treatment of the Free Churches and of the social history of religion almost as soon as it was published, and in these and other areas subsequent research has long overtaken Chadwick’s work. More seriously, sometimes the wood gets lost for the trees. In the otherwise excellent chapter by Russell Sandberg on the post-Restoration Church, there is very little sense both of the sheer difficulty Anglicans faced at local and national levels in reinstating the pastoral ministry and effective oversight, and at the same time of the relative success with which they managed to do so well into the eighteenth century. Likewise, Stephen Coleman’s chapter on the early eighteenth century could have done with a ‘framing’ or scene-setting paragraph or two setting out the main pastoral challenges of the period and the revolution in modern historiography on the eighteenth-century Church.

At whom is the book aimed? It is expensive in hardback, and it is at times challenging reading. Some knowledge of English church history is desirable, which suggests that the target audience is not the general reader, so much as the academic specialist, theological student, and church officer, who wants something which will bring together a panoramic survey of its subject matter in a single volume. But it repays careful reading. No better case could be made for the central importance of church law, not only to the practical functioning of the Church of England today, but to the understanding and interpretation of its history. Likewise, as the editors point out in their summative conclusion, it is also central to understanding the evolution of the Anglican Communion. And as they observe, with the revision of the canons and the revival of the study of canon law, English ecclesiastical law has returned ‘to its original function – as the law of faith community made by that community for that community as it discharges its mission to wider society’ (p 238). I hope this book is indeed taken up in colleges and courses, and widely recommended for everyone seeking to exercise some sort of public ministry in the Church of England.