on documents will make clear the
customary phraseology in England during the Middle Ages. King John's
Ecclesiastical Charter of 1214 uses the terms "Church of England" and
"English Church." The Magna Charta of 1215 grants that the "Church of
England shall be free and have her rights intact, and her liberties
uninjured." The Articuli Cleri of 1316 speak of the "English Church."
The Second Statute of Provisors of 1390 uses the title "The Holy Church
of England." "The English Church" is the form used in the Act "De
Haeretico Comburendo" of 1401, as it is also in "the Remonstrance against
the Legatine Powers of Cardinal Beaufort" of 1428[1].

[Footnote 1: Documents in Gee & Hardy.]

These quotations will suffice to show the customary way of speaking of
the Church in England. If this customary way of speaking went on during
and after the Reformation the inference is that there had no change
taken place in the way of men's thinking about the Church; that they
were unconscious of having created a new or a different Church. We know
that the Protestant bodies on the Continent and the later Protestant
bodies in England did change their way of thinking about the Church from
that of their fathers and consequently their way of speaking of it. But
the formal documents of the Church of England show no change. "The
Answer of the Ordinaries" of 1532 appeals as authoritative to the
"determination of Scripture and Holy Church," and to the determination
of "Christ's Catholic Church." The "Conditional Restraint of Annates" of
1532 protests that the English "as well spiritual as temporal, be as
obedient, devout, catholic, and humble children of God and Holy Church,
as any people be within any realm christened." In the Act for "The
Restraint of Appeals" of 1533, which is the act embodying the legal
principle of the English Reformation, it is the "English Church" which
acts. The statement in the "Act Forbidding Papal Dispensations and the
Payment of Peter's Pence" of 1534 is entirely explicit as to the
intention of the English authorities. It declares that nothing in this
Act "shall be hereafter interpreted or expounded that your grace, your
nobles and subjects intend, by the same, to decline or vary from the
congregation of Christ's Church in any things concerning the very
articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom[2]."

[Footnote 2: Gee & Hardy.]

These documents date from the reign of Henry VIII. In the same reign
another series of a