The Court of Arches allowed an appeal brought by the Church Buildings Council against the decision of the Winchester Consistory Court to grant a faculty authorising the sale of the Wootton St Lawrence armet, an early sixteenth-century helmet that had hung above a tomb in the church. In doing so the Court established a number of principles that apply to proposals for the disposal of church treasures. The question a chancellor had to decide was ‘whether the grounds for sale are sufficiently compelling to outweigh the strong presumption against sale’. The more valuable or significant the article, the more difficult it would be for petitioners to discharge the burden of proof. Financial need falling short of a financial emergency would seldom on its own outweigh the strong presumption against sale but it was to be weighed with any other factors favouring sale. Petitions for faculties to permit the sale of church treasures should usually be dealt with at a hearing in open court, whether or not the petition was formally opposed. Some recent first-instance decisions suggested that the separation of an article from the church, resulting from its having been placed in a bank or on loan to a museum, had taken on importance as a free-standing reason for disposal by sale. Rejecting that approach, the Court held that ‘little weight should normally attach to separation as a reason for disposal by sale, and we doubt that separation would ever, on its own, have sufficient strength to justify sale of a church treasure’.

The Court re-affirmed the principle set out in its previous decision in Re St Helen, Brant Broughton [1974] Fam 16 that parishes should not seek to dispose of valuable articles merely because they could not afford full insurance cover. Where there were ‘compelling reasons’ why a treasure could no longer be retained in a church, a loan to a museum or gallery or to the diocesan treasury would normally be a sensible solution. Chancellors should apply a ‘sequential approach’ when the disposal of church treasures was contemplated, considering first disposal by loan, and only where that was inapposite, disposal by sale to a museum or gallery; only where such limited sale was inapposite should disposal by sale on the open market be considered. Disposal by loan and limited sale safeguarded the security and visibility of the article. The interests of ‘public visibility’ should normally prevail when the court was considering proposed disposal by sale of articles of local or national distinction.

As to the instant case, the Court held that the financial case for the sale of the armet was tenuous. The chancellor should not have reached the conclusion that the petitioners had a strong financial case for selling the armet and his erroneous conclusion on financial need required his decision on sale to be quashed. The chancellor also erred in his approach to the issue of separation. He had described the link between the armet and the parish as very limited and the connection between the armet and the church as having been severed by virtue of its having been deposited in the Royal Armouries for forty years. There was no basis in law or in fact for the conclusion he reached on this aspect of the case and the appeal therefore also succeeded on this ground. The Court was satisfied that the petition should be dismissed. The armet was a national asset with historic links to the parish and there was no proven financial case for its sale. Little, if any, weight should attach to the fact that it had been physically out of the church, and therefore outside the parish, for many years. Accepting that their decision would cause dismay to the petitioners and seem surprising to people unfamiliar with ecclesiastical law, it was the Court's view that ‘the strong presumption against disposal by sale of Church treasures, which we have applied in this case, is both soundly based and generally beneficial in its consequences’. [Alexander McGregor]