Definition
In English ecclesiastical law, ARCHES (also Court of Arches, or Arches Court) is the principal court of appeal of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It exercises both appellate jurisdiction over decisions from diocesan ecclesiastical courts within the Province of Canterbury, and in some matters original jurisdiction. The court's presiding officer bears the title Dean of the Arches.
The name derives from the church of St. Mary-le-Bow (Beata Maria de Arcubus) in London — so called from the arched construction of its steeple — where the court was anciently held. By the modern period the court had relocated, sitting at Westminster and later at Lambeth Palace.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "arch" — a curved structural element in architecture.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's treats Arches primarily through the compound "Court of Arches," defining it as the appeal court of the Archbishop of Canterbury, presided over by the Dean of the Arches. The architectural meaning is otherwise dominant in general usage.
The gap here is total. A researcher encountering "Arches" in an ecclesiastical or English legal record is not reading a description of architecture. The term is a proper institutional name, and the architectural reference is vestigial — the building is long gone from the court's history. Missing this distinction will send a researcher in the wrong direction entirely.
Common Confusion
ARCHES vs. ARCHIVES: Bouvier's Law Dictionary entry for this term is, in fact, titled "Archives" — a distinct concept referring to depositories of public records and ancient documents. The proximity of these headwords in older dictionaries, and the occasional loose indexing of historical legal reference works, creates a real risk of conflation. Arches is a court; Archives is a records repository. They share no functional relationship.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century English ecclesiastical records will encounter the Court of Arches primarily as an appellate tribunal — the destination for appeals from bishops' consistory courts across the Province of Canterbury. Understanding this jurisdictional position is essential for tracing the procedural history of any ecclesiastical matter: probate disputes, matrimonial causes, tithe controversies, and clerical discipline cases could all move through Arches on appeal.
The court's dual jurisdiction (appellate and original) means records may exist at Arches even when no lower-court proceeding is apparent in diocesan sources — do not assume a missing lower-court record means a case never existed.
Appeals from the Court of Arches proceeded further to the Court of Delegates (prior to 1833) and thereafter to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. A research chain that stops at Arches may be incomplete; check both directions.
The Ecclesiastical Courts Commission of 1832 and the subsequent Ecclesiastical Courts Act 1833 significantly reorganized ecclesiastical appellate jurisdiction. Historical sources written before these reforms describe a different procedural landscape than those written after. Dating your source is not optional.
Rapalje & Lawrence offers no independent definition, redirecting entirely to "Court of Arches" — a useful signal that the term was understood in the American legal reference tradition as a specialized English institution requiring its own entry, not a general legal concept.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries handle this term at different depths and from different angles, which together give a reasonably complete picture.
Burrill's is the most substantive, providing the Latin (curia de arcubus), the ecclesiastical structure, the jurisdictional scope (appeal and original), and the architectural etymology of the name. Burrill cites Blackstone's Commentaries (Book III) and Stephen's Commentaries — both reliable anchors for the English common law tradition on this point.
Webster's 1913, though a general dictionary, offers a compact and accurate description aligned with Burrill's, including the Dean of the Arches title and the Mozley & Whiteley legal dictionary as a secondary source.
Bouvier's entry for this headword is, as noted above, actually "Archives" — a separate concept. This is either a cataloguing artifact or a misprint in the edition consulted. It provides no useful information about the Court of Arches itself, though it accurately describes archives as repositories for records and charters, citing Cowell and Spelman's Glossary.
Rapalje & Lawrence's bare cross-reference ("See COURT OF ARCHES") reflects the American tradition's appropriate treatment of this as a distinctly English institution — worth knowing but not worth independent elaboration in an American legal dictionary.
None of the historical sources addresses the post-1833 reorganization in any detail. Researchers using these dictionaries for matters arising after the Ecclesiastical Courts Act must supplement with more current sources.
Jurisdictional Note
The Court of Arches is an institution of the Church of England and the Province of Canterbury specifically. It has no American equivalent and no direct counterpart in the Province of York, which has its own appellate court (the Chancery Court of York). Researchers in Scottish, Irish, or American ecclesiastical records will not encounter this court.