In Bishop Eric Kemp's autobiography he describes, with characteristic modesty, the origins of the Ecclesiastical Law Society as emerging from an informal group that flourished in the 1950s and early ‘60s, convened by Chancellor Garth Moore and himself. The group met at their respective colleges: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Exeter College, Oxford.Footnote 1 In his ‘inaugurating’ lectureFootnote 2 to the emergent Society at the conference at Corpus Christi College in March 1978, Eric Kemp said of the earlier meetings and of the Cambridge conference itself:
We did not form a society, but a few people, clergy, lawyers and historians met in alternate years … I hope our gathering this weekend will produce something more lasting, something which will renew the spirit of canon law and the life of the Church of England.
It was in response to this challenge, supported by Chancellors Garth Moore and Graham Routledge, as well as by others still happily flourishing and continuing as members of the Society,Footnote 3 that those who attended the Cambridge conference unanimously resolved to establish the Society at a meeting presided over by Sir John Owen, the then Dean of Arches.
In the second issue of the Journal, Graham Routledge wrote a short article entitled ‘The Society and its future’.Footnote 4 He began with the famous parody of Doctors’ Commons by Charles Dickens in David Copperfield:
‘Nonsense, Steerforth!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don't mean to say that there is any affinity between nautical matters and ecclesiastical matters?’
‘I don't indeed, my dear boy’, he returned; ‘but I mean to say that they are managed and decided by the same set of people down in that same Doctors’ Commons. You shall go there one day, and find them blundering through half the nautical terms in Young's Dictionary, apropos of the “Nancy” having run down the “Sarah Jane” or Mr Peggotty and the Yarmouth boatman having put off in a gale of wind with an anchor and cable to the “Nelson” Indiaman in distress; and you shall go there another day, and find them deep in the evidence, pro and con, respecting a clergyman who has misbehaved himself; and you shall find the judge in the nautical case, the advocate in the clergyman's case, or contrariwise. They are like actors; now a man's a judge and now he is not a judge; now he's one thing, now he's another; now he's something else, change and change about; but it's always a very pleasant profitable little affair of private theatricals, presented to an uncommonly select audience.’
In Dickens’ time, Doctors’ Commons still continued its maritime jurisdiction. More seriously, Graham Routledge connected the Society with the earlier informal Oxbridge meetings and with the recommendations of the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Canon Law in 1947:Footnote 5
Our President and Chancellor Garth Moore made valiant attempts to promote the Commission's aspirations, and it is on their earlier endeavours that our Society is being built. Those of us who have been concerned with its establishment hope that the Canon Law Commission's aims can be achieved. We cannot revive Doctors’ Commons, but the Society can try to revive a more serious and sustained interest in the study and practice of ecclesiastical and canon law.Footnote 6
Note the phrase ‘those of us’: Graham Routledge was indeed one of the founders. Michael Goodman and Brian Hanson tell of planning meetings in relation to the creation of the Society at 3 Amen Court, Routledge's residence as a Canon of St Paul's in London. By providential dispensation I know the very room well as it became our dining room after Routledge's tragic early death from cancer; I eventually followed him as a Canon and moved into his house.
In the article referred to, Routledge went on to say with great prescience:
Not only should we be concerned with ‘lawyers law’ but should try to make our contribution to the discussion on wider ethical and social issues in which there is a legal aspect or element. We can also help to foster ecumenical relations, especially with the Roman Catholic Canon Law Society.Footnote 7
Much of the Society's current interest, especially as exhibited through the Journal, is indicative of Routledge's wisdom in relation to future agenda, especially in the field of law, religion and human rights. His comments on the ecumenical value of the Society have a further personal resonance for your current chairman. It was in the bar at a residential Anglican–Roman Catholic meeting that Graham and I talked about law, establishment and the churches. He told me I ought to be a member of the new Society coming into being, and so I became. There were, however, interesting discussions about the qualifications for membership of the Society as embodied in the Constitution. Here Chancellor Garth Moore argued firmly for a more exclusive ‘learned’ Society. Brian Hanson remembers the complexities of the membership categories (which he had to draft) following Garth Moore's more ‘academic’ understanding of the Society.
A note entitled ‘Aims and objects’ published in the first Issue of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal in July 1987 (but based on an earlier typed and duplicated version that appeared a month earlier as a Newsletter) records that the Society proposed ‘to channel its studies in three particular ways’.Footnote 8 The three ways were: the education and training of lawyers and archdeacons; the enlargement of knowledge of canon and ecclesiastical law throughout the Church; and the offering of assistance in matters of ecclesiastical law by way of study, research or advice to Synod, bishops and Church leaders. Here the feeling of an ‘expert body’ is again expounded. Your present chairman only just scraped into membership by virtue of a category of Church administrator because he was the Ecumenical Secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Subsequent commitment to the core purpose of education has led to a simplification of membership requirements in the recently revised Constitution; we are a learning society as well as a learned society. Our membership is now almost sevenfold that of 25 years ago. But we would not be here at all without Garth Moore, Graham Routledge and Eric Kemp. If Garth Moore's understanding of the Society has been expanded, another of his aims – the publication of chancellors’ judgments – has been more widely achieved.
To Eric Kemp, I believe, is due our gratitude for the remembrance of that now long ago report on the revision of canon law.Footnote 9 Eric, as is well known, was the convenor of those who worked through the revision of the canon law in Convocations and Synod under Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher. He often recounted ‘headmaster’ Fisher ‘marking’ the drafts with him at Lambeth and sending him back to committee to start again. Eric will have looked at the original report frequently for it was the mandate of the reform. Towards the end of the long, and very learned, report immediately before its specimen draft canons the 1947 Archbishops’ Commission looked to the future:
The success of a new code of canons will to a great extent depend on a wider knowledge than at present exists among the clergy of the law of the Church of England, its nature, history, development, and particular characteristics; and it is hoped that the previous chapters of this Report will provide an elementary introduction to the subject. We recommend therefore that those who are responsible for the training of ordination candidates and for the post-ordination training of clergy should be asked to consider what steps can be taken to give both ordinands and clergy a more professional knowledge of the Church's law and constitution. In giving evidence before the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission in 1883 the late Sir Lewis Dibdin pointed out that since the disappearance of Doctors’ Commons in 1857 there had really been no method of teaching or preserving a knowledge of the Ecclesiastical Law. It is impossible at this stage to revive anything like Doctors’ Commons, but we would suggest that a society, consisting of clergy, professional historians, and lawyers, be formed for the purpose of studying the Ecclesiastical Law and of suggesting ways in which that law either needs alteration or can be developed to meet new needs. As a rule there is far too little contact and interchange of ideas and points of view between the clergy and ecclesiastical lawyers, and such a society would give opportunities for this. Such a society would train up a number of people competent to advise and help clergy in the particular problems of Ecclesiastical Law with which from time to time they are confronted.Footnote 10
Kemp was much concerned for the reform of canon law even before 1947. In 1943 he worked with Vigo Auguste Demant (who also lived in 3 Amen Court prior to his becoming a Canon Professor at Christ Church, Oxford) in the production of a book called Thy Household the Church, his chapter being on discipline, canon and ecclesiastical law.Footnote 11 After the report he published an article on reform and a tract on the same subject for the Church Literature Association.Footnote 12 This was presumably the reason why Archbishop Fisher called upon him to see the canon law revision through its 20-year progress. I am, however, minded to speculate further.
Was he actually party to the original suggestion embodied in the 1947 Report? He was a curate in Winchester diocese at the beginning of the war, when Edward Selwyn was dean and Cyril Garbett was bishop, both of whom were members of the Canon Law Commission, though there is no evidence that curate, dean or bishop discussed the matter together. Kemp returned to Oxford in 1941, first to Pusey House, then as Chaplain at Christ Church from 1943, going on to be Fellow and Chaplain at Exeter in 1946. Claude Jenkins, significantly another member of the Commission, was Regius Professor of History and a Canon of Christ Church and Robert Mortimer (later Bishop of Exeter) was Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and another Canon of Christ Church. As we have seen, Kemp was already studying and writing on canon law at this time. His dissertation for his Oxford BD was actually examined by Claude Jenkins, whom Eric spoke of as knowing well and whose canon law seminar Eric joined as he began his postgraduate studies. The seminar also included Robert Mortimer. These extensive Christ Church connections cannot have failed to mean some conversations – including, perhaps, the idea of a society.
What is certain is that he did not forget the Commission's plea for a society. In 1956 Eric Kemp gave the Lichfield Cathedral Lectures. I regret, though a son of the diocese of Lichfield, that I did not attend them – being eleven at the time. They became his An Introduction to Canon Law in the Church of England.Footnote 13 Towards the end of the third lecture Eric Kemp referred to the 1947 Report already quoted and on which he commented: ‘This is, to my mind, one of the most important proposals in this whole Report, and yet it has been virtually ignored.’Footnote 14
He went on to say that it did not in fact go far enough and called for training in ecclesiastical law for lawyers and clergy alike. Only relatively recently have we seen the revival of such academic teaching pioneered at Cardiff University and even more recently elsewhere. Canon and ecclesiastical law has now finally been added to the pre- and post-ordination training syllabus of the Church of England. Above all he saw that a Society could ‘bring lawyers and clergymen together and help each group to a greater understanding of the other's point of view (and) encourage the study of the law of the church among the clergy’. The continuities of aspiration for a society are reflected in what he said about the origin of the Society, many years later, in his memoir:
I was invited to give the 1956 Lichfield Divinity Lectures. I discussed the contrast between canon law and common law and put in a plea that, in relation to the revision of the canons, proper attention should be given to the place of nature and custom in canon law. The Garbett Commission had referred to the lack of any body of canon lawyers to maintain interest in the subject and encourage knowledge of its principle and customs. Therefore Chancellor Garth Moore and I decided to gather some people together to fill this gap, and started a canon law revision group … we succeeded in gathering a number of lawyers, historians and others and met regularly for several years. A year or two after we had stopped, Chancellor Graham Routledge and others convened a conference at Cambridge which formed the Ecclesiastical Law Society … I was surprised and honoured to be invited to become its first President.Footnote 15
From all this I believe that the idea of the Society remained with Eric Kemp, probably from his days at Christ Church with Claude Jenkins and Robert Mortimer but certainly from 1947 and the published Canon Law Report and revived in his Lichfield lectures. It remained alive in the ’50s and ’60s in the informal Oxbridge group and came to fruition through the vision of Garth Moore, Eric Kemp and the organising energy of Graham Routledge – and other friends and colleagues in the Society, past and present, through the Cambridge Conference of 1987.
