Privilege (canon Law) - Academic Degrees

Academic Degrees

In some instances petitioners sought an academic degree because without one they could not hold a particular office. Canons of certain cathedrals and Westminster Abbey were still required to be degree-holders until recent times. The Dean of Westminster Abbey was required to be a doctor or bachelor of divinity as recently as the late twentieth century. In these cases, conferring the status of a graduate is the granting of a privilege, in that the recipient has received a positive favour not generally enjoyed by most people, but it also acted as a dispensation with the requirements of the canon law. Still, however they were justified, in canon law, the conferral of degrees or degree status gave substantial and substantive rights and privileges, and were not merely empty honours.

In the event of degree status being conferred, the recipient was not deemed to hold the degree in question, but would enjoy any privileges which might be attached to such a degree—including qualification for office. Conferring the degree itself would of course would mean that the recipient enjoyed the style and not merely the privileges of a degree. They might also, for example, be thereafter admitted or incorporated to the same degree ad eundum at Oxford or Cambridge—though few seem to have been so distinguished. It was however often difficult to be certain whether the degree itself, or merely its status and privileges, which was being conferred. Given the ostensible purpose of the papal dispensatory jurisdiction, it would perhaps be more logical to view all of these “degrees” as strictly degree-status, and not substantive degrees. But the medieval—if not indeed modern—concept of the degree is of a grade or status. One achieves the status of master or doctor, which is conferred by one's university (or in rare cases, by the pope). It is not an award, but the recognition of a certain degree of learning. It is perhaps significant that in the records of the (post-Reformation) Court of Faculties, the early “Lambeth degrees” are described in terms of dispensation to enjoy the privilege of DCL or whatever the degree might be.

The exercise of the authority to confer such a privilege was often a positive step by the pope to emphasise his spiritual, if not temporal, authority. During the fifteenth century, attempts were made in England to restrict the exercise of papal power in opposition to the Statute of Provisors. To evade the disabilities imposed by that Act on non-graduates, it became usual towards the end of the century for those clerics not educated at English universities to obtain dispensations from Rome, including, in a few cases, degrees. These were positive favours not generally enjoyed by most people, and that they were dispensing with the requirements of the Canon law was a secondary consideration. They were also exercised for the good of the individual as well as the good of the church.