oy, and Dr. Harvey obtained a
lease of it for one hundred years of the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's,
for the annual rent of five marks. Before this the civilians and
canonists had lodged in a small inconvenient house in Paternoster Row,
afterwards the "Queen's Head Tavern." Cardinal Wolsey, always
magnificent in his schemes, had planned a "fair college of stone" for
the ecclesiastical lawyers, the plan of which Sir Robert Cotton
possessed. In this college, in 1631, says Buc, the Master of the
Revels, lived in commons with the Judge of the High Court of Admiralty,
being a doctor of civil law, the Dean of the Arches, the Judges of the
Court of Delegates, the Vicar-General, and the Master or Custos of the
Prerogative Court of Canterbury.

Doctors' Commons, says Strype, "consists of five courts--three
appertaining to the see of Canterbury, one to the see of London, and one
to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralties." The functions of these
several courts he thus defines:--

"Here are the courts kept for the practice of civil or ecclesiastical
causes. Several offices are also here kept; as the Registrary of the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Registrary of the Bishop of London.

"The causes whereof the civil and ecclesiastical law take cognisance are
those that follow, as they are enumerated in the 'Present State of
England:'--Blasphemy, apostacy from Christianity, heresy, schism,
ordinations, institutions of clerks to benefices, celebration of Divine
service, matrimony, divorces, bastardy, tythes, oblations, obventions,
mortuaries, dilapidations, reparation of churches, probate of wills,
administrations, simony, incests, fornications, adulteries, solicitation
of chastity; pensions, procurations, commutation of penance, right of
pews, and other such like, reducible to those matters.

"The courts belonging to the civil and ecclesiastical laws are divers.

"First, the Court of _Arches_, which is the highest court belonging to
the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a court formerly kept in Bow Church
in Cheapside; and the church and tower thereof being arched, the court
was from thence called _The Arches_, and so still is called. Hither are
all appeals directed in ecclesiastical matters within the province of
Canterbury. To this court belongs a judge who is called _The Dean of the
Arches_, so styled because he hath a jurisdiction over a deanery in
London, consisting of thirteen parishes exempt from the jurisdiction of