Catalogue description Records of the Chancery's ecclesiastical business

Chancery exercised, or serviced, a wide variety of the Crown's ecclesiastical business. Numerous benefices and ecclesiastical offices below the rank of bishop were in the gift of the Crown, and others were in the gift of the chancellor. Appointments to these livings were made by letters patent, and in the eighteenth century the handling of this work fell to a designated clerk of presentations (or, to be exact, to a deputy), who received petitions for benefices, together with the chancellor's fiat if forthcoming, and made out the relevant patents.

Similarly, the clerk of dispensations and faculties, first appointed in 1534, dealt with those procedures insofar as they required confirmation by the Crown: for instance, dispensations for clergy to hold benefices in plurality; faculties for degrees in arts, laws, or medicine, or for other purposes. Such dispensations and faculties originated from the archbishop of Canterbury, but required confirmation by the Crown and enrolment in Chancery. All these functions were later found not to require separate clerical provision, and both clerkships were abolished in 1832.

The Crown also involved itself in many other ecclesiastical matters, both requesting (under certiorari returnable in Chancery) information about the appointments and endowments of clergy, and seeking favours or actions by ecclesiastical officers or institutions. These matters passed through various hands in Chancery, and much of the miscellaneous ecclesiastical business cannot be attributed to any particular body of clerks, but the residual responsibility for it seems to have fallen to the clerks of the Petty Bag, among whose records other ecclesiastical business may be found.