The Constitutions of Clarendon
Sixteen articles drawn up at Clarendon in 1164 as a record of the customs of the English crown in church matters under Henry I. They are the king’s statement of the case that Thomas Becket refused to seal.
Read the text at avalon.law.yale.edu ↗The same translation at the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook ↗
The document calls itself a record of part of the “customs and liberties and dignities” of the king’s predecessors, made in the tenth year of Henry II of England in the presence of the bishops and barons, and it names Thomas Becket first among the bishops who granted them. It is dated at Clarendon on the fourth day before the feast of the Purification, which falls on 2 February.
It is the royal side’s formulation. It presents as old custom what the archbishop treated as an attack on the liberty of the church, and its statement that the bishops promised to observe the articles should be read beside the chroniclers’ accounts of how that promise was obtained and withdrawn.
Cited in
- 29 December 1170, firm date