Ryan Tindall

I’ve been thinking a good deal this year about Church of England canon law and Anglican ecclesiastical law in general, after working up a paper on Cranmer’s attempt at canon law revision for an independent study at Duke Divinity.

The topic that I ended up digging into for my paper was the constitutional theory of repugnancy, which seems to have its origins in local applications of the canon law–e.g., that a local ecclesiastical custom can survive conflict with the formal canon law as long as it is not repugnant to the canon law. This idea of repugnancy, by the time of Coke, is a tool that he can wield to declare an act of Parliament repugnant to the English Constitution. That concept (if not the word itself; I’ve yet to dig into that), becomes key to the colonial resistance to Parliament’s claim of sovereignty over the colonies–as they find Parliament’s attempts repugnant to their charters, repugnant to their rights under the English Constitution as Englishmen.

There are, I suppose, two questions that arise from this line of thought. Were Coke or any of the English Whigs aware of the intellectual origins of this tool of resistance to arbitrary authority or imperial-religious control? And if they were, were any of the American Whigs aware of it?

I remembered, pondering this, that one of John Adams’ early political essays was entitled A Dissertation on the Feudal and Canon Law. And so I read it last week, and honestly, it did not leave me with much hope for subtlety in that arena. His view of medieval papal authority as it existed in England seems pretty characteristic of a New England Puritan, lacking much historical subtlety. But I’m interested in seeing just how much that might be the case, as Adams’ legal education (as I’ve written about before) was both deep and wide, and it included St. German’s Doctor and Student certainly, and would seemingly have been at least influenced by Lyndwood’s Provinicale.

Given my love for and enduring fascination with Adams, it seems like he might be a good American Whig to start with, while pursuing the English question at the same time.