THE PRACTICE OF THE Ecclesiastical Courts, WITH FORMS AND TABLES OF COSTS. BY HENRY CHARLES COOTE, PROCTOR IN DOCTORS' COMMONS, and one of THE EXAMINERS TO THE JUDICIAL THE ARCHES AND PREROGATIVE COURTS OF CANTERBURY. LONDON: HENRY BUTTERWORTH, 7, FLEET STREET, Law Bookseller and Publisher. HODGES AND SMITH, GRAFTON ST., DUBLIN. ADVERTISEMENT. THE principles which regulate the Judicial Practice of the Ecclesiastical Courts have, in their older form, been illustrated by Clerke, Conset, and Oughton; the latter of whom has also annexed to his work some formular precedents, which have long since, however, become obsolete and impracticable. With this solitary exception, (if, indeed, it be such,) there is not, as far as I am aware, any publication either of early or recent date, which has been conceived upon the plan of the present Compilation, and it was the consideration of this deficiency which prompted me to make the first step toward supplying it by a Selection of such Modern and Approved Precedents as would embody and elucidate the General Principles of Ecclesiastical Practice. The peculiarity, therefore, which I claim for the following pages will, I trust, assist to excuse the faults which will be found in them, and suggest to the candid Reader, who is not ignorant of the difficulties which attend the adoption of a new method, an indulgence for any imperfection of information, or crudeness of remark, which the scrutiny of a critic may detect. In making the assertion, however, that the method which I have pursued forms the peculiarity of these pages, I mean only to express that no complete or general compilation on this subject has yet been submitted to the judgment of the Public. In the lucid and excellent Sections on Practice which have appeared in the new edition of Burn's "Treatise on the Ecclesiastical Law," by Dr. Robert Phillimore, the same plan has been followed; though, owing to the range of the work being too wide to allow the amplification of any single department, they are necessarily on a small and limited scale. If the learned and talented Editor had extended his plan so as to embrace all the phases of practice discernible in the Ecclesiastical Courts, there would have been no necessity for the present Compilation, and I should have unhesitatingly suppressed the materials which I had collected for it. Doctors' Commons. HENRY C. COOTE. INTRODUCTION. NOTWITHSTANDING the attention which the Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction has for many ages attracted, from the religious and important nature of the powers which it exercises, very scanty information can be found in print respecting its early or later history in this country. The difficulty, therefore, which the compiler of the present manual experienced in procuring authentic materials for this subject will, he trusts, be his excuse for the following meagre and insufficient notices collected by him during the leisure moments of an active professional career. Considering that some explanation was due to the reader before he entered on the details of the legal practice of the Ecclesiastical Courts, he had recourse to the original sources of the Archiepiscopal Registra, which exist only in manuscript, in order to obtain the required elucidation: and it is chiefly from these records, aided in some instances by the older church historians, that the compiler has derived the groundwork of the following observations, the scope of which is principally B |