Dr Codex Silenced: Middleton v Crofts Revisited

Edmund Gibson, bishop of London was an able canonist, a High Churchman and ironically the key ecclesiastical personality associated with Walpole's Whig and Hanoverian administration. In an irreverent age, Gibson was a keen supporter of the reformation of manners. Anticlericalism and a series of parliamentary reverses made Gibson's position untenable by 1735. In the following year Lord Hardwicke in the King's Bench in judgment in Middleton v Crofts settled the position of the laity as not bound by the canons of the Church of England. This controversial judgment went unchallenged and has been thoroughly endorsed by later opinion. This paper seeks to examine Gibson's manuscript objections to the judgment and to wonder at the judgment's significance for ecclesiastical law today.