The Henson Journals

[537]

Friday, December 17th, 1915.

501st day

I spent the morning in carefully reading again Dixon's volume V, & I had the satisfaction of discovering an error. On p.135 mention is made of Elizabeth's Injunction regulating clerical marriages, and the comment follows: "This regulation fell dead from the first, & was only meant by way of a caution". But Parker writing to Cecil in 1569, (that is just 10 years after the Injunctions were issued) says that he 'urged the Injunction upon all ministers, when their case came in question, whether they were capable of any ecclesiastical living, if they married not in such due form as yet he thought was godly prescribed'. He protested against a tendency among the lawyers to belittle the authority of the Injunctions. "Sir, I think these lawyers keep but their old trade, & not regard much the imperial laws of the prince, & yet these new cases of marrying have no other direction in the law beforetimes, but by Injunction for this present time." (v. Correspondence p. 352) It would seem that the Puritan fondness for matrimony was assisted by the legal bias towards Puritanism, & succeeded after an interval in reducing the unpalatable Injunction to a dead letter.

After lunch I presided in the Chapter House at the annual Audit. The most formidable factor is the reduction of our net income by the waxing income tax. On that part of the corporate income which is liable to the tax, we must anticipate a further increase of tax during the next year of hardly less than £1000. A heavy fog was, perhaps, the principal cause of a dreadful railway accident at Jarrow, in which no less than 14 persons were miserably burned to death.

---