clergy, benefit of: see benefit of clergy.

clergy: see ministry; monasticism; orders, holy.

benefit of clergy, term originally applied to the exemption of Christian clerics from criminal prosecution in the secular courts. The privilege was established by the 12th cent., and it extended only to the commission of felonies. The ecclesiastical courts did not inflict capital punishment except in rare cases, in which event those adjudged guilty were turned over to local secular authorities for enforcement of the sentence (see canon law). In the ecclesiastical courts the severest sentences usually were degradation and the imposition of penances. Many criminals posed as clerics to obtain benefit of clergy. In England the privilege was soon extended to all clerks, i.e., literate persons. The ecclesiastical courts lost all jurisdiction over criminal acts in 1576, and thereafter clerics were tried by the secular courts and, under statute law, were either discharged or sentenced to a year's imprisonment. Early in the 18th cent. the reading test was abolished and all persons were allowed to claim this privilege for the first conviction of felony; later the privilege was extended generally to peers and women. Benefit of clergy thus mitigated the severities of English criminal law, which imposed the death penalty for many offenses now deemed trivial. Criminal law was ameliorated in the early 19th cent., and in 1827 benefit of clergy was abolished as being no longer necessary. In the United States it was abolished in 1790 for all federal crimes, and c.1850 it disappeared from the state courts. The term "benefit of clergy" has come in popular usage to mean sanction of the clergy, particularly in the phrase "marriage without benefit of clergy."

Clergy Reserves, those lands set apart in Upper and Lower Canada under the British Constitutional Act of 1791 "for the support and maintenance of a Protestant clergy." "Protestant clergy" was interpreted to mean the clergy of the Church of England. This interpretation was fiercely upheld by John Strachan and others but dissatisfied other Protestant denominations and became an issue in the Rebellion of 1837. The method of allotting reserves kept discontinuous plots out of cultivation and prevented settlement and the expansion of roads. An act of 1840 by the assembly of Upper Canada provided for the sale and distribution of the reserves, but this was disallowed by the British government. In 1854 the government finally passed a law secularizing the reserves, but the Anglican and Presbyterian churches retained the endowments that had been granted them.

Lands set aside for the Church of England in Canada. Established by the Constitutional Act of 1791 “for the support and maintenance of a Protestant clergy,” they amounted to one-seventh of all land grants. They became controversial after 1815, as some denominations demanded equal reserves and others argued that the lands should serve general public purposes independent of religion. An imperial act of 1827 allowed for the sale of one-fourth of the reserved land; in 1840 another imperial act forbade the creation of any new reserves. The reserves were finally secularized in 1854.

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