The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). These laws dealt with moral offences, that is the spiritual discipline of the personnel of the Church and their parishioners. The Church in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Adultery, fornication, breach of marriage contract, sexual slander - these, along with religious offences of various kinds, were typical of the cases dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Church of England courts operated under canon law, which was subordinate to common and statute law. Crime and punishment in Elizabethan England Article written by: Liza Picard; Themes: Shakespeare’s life and world ... To deny that Elizabeth was the head of the Church in England, as Roman Catholics did, was to threaten her government and was treason, for which the penalty was death by hanging. 4 The Elizabethan Court. Elizabeth I viewed the 1559 Religious Settlement as an Act of State, which was to establish a proper relationship between the Crown and the Church. Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. Once the Religious Settlement had taken … A royal court is difficult to define because it changed constantly, but it was generally made up of the queen and all of the people who clustered around her, taking care of her household and personal needs and helping her to govern the country.

In Elizabethan England there was one center of power—the royal court. People convicted of crimes were usually held in jails until their trials, which were typically quick and slightly skewed in favor of the prosecution ("Torture in the Tower of London, 1597"). The Church Courts, 16th century to 1857. The Judicial system in Elizabethan England was an old system, passed down from the Anglo-Saxon Era. The Elizabethan Religious Settlement, Catholics, Archbishops of Canterbury. The Elizabethan Religious Settlement is the name given to the religious and political arrangements made for England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) that brought the English Reformation to a conclusion. How far-reaching was such surveillance in actual practice? The Settlement shaped the theology and liturgy of the Church of England and was important to the development of Anglicanism as a distinct Christian tradition.

The church courts throw valuable light onto the family lives of our ancestors, who often got up to all sorts of unmentionable activities. Elizabeth desperately wanted to repair all the damage that had been caused within her kingdom in the previous decades under the name of religion. What was it like to live in a society in which personal morality was regulated by law in this fashion?