Definition
De clero (Latin: "concerning the clergy") is the title of the English statute 25 Edward III, Statute 3, enacted in 1351. The statute addressed a cluster of matters touching the legal relationship between the English Crown and the established church, including the process of presentations to ecclesiastical benefices, the manner in which spiritual persons could be indicted, and related procedural protections for clergy. It is one of several medieval English statutes that defined the boundaries of ecclesiastical and temporal jurisdiction in England.
Why It Matters in Research
De clero is primarily a term of English legal history, not a living doctrine. Researchers are most likely to encounter it in:
— Historical sources on the benefit of clergy and the medieval jurisdictional competition between royal and ecclesiastical courts. De clero sits within a web of statutes — alongside Praemunire and Provisors — that together shaped how English law treated the clergy as a distinct legal class.
— Secondary literature on English legal history, particularly Reeve's History of English Law, where the statute receives direct treatment (2 Reeve, Eng. Law, 378). Researchers using that source will find the statute contextualized within the broader 14th-century regulatory project governing the church.
— Early modern pleading and records. Because de clero touched indictment procedures for spiritual persons, it may appear in ecclesiastical court records, Year Book commentary, or Fitzherbert's Natura Brevium in discussions of related writs and procedural points.
The statute has no modern operative significance in any common law jurisdiction. Its relevance today is archival and historical. Researchers should not conflate de clero with the broader doctrine of benefit of clergy, though the two are related: benefit of clergy is the substantive privilege; de clero is one of several statutes that regulated how clergy were treated within the court system, including indictment procedures.
Be alert to truncated citations in older sources. Burrill's entry breaks off mid-citation, and the second edition of Black's contains a fragment that appears to belong to an adjacent entry (the reference to "manding him to take such security" is from a different writ entirely). These typographical artifacts are common in the digitized historical dictionaries and can mislead a researcher into thinking de clero had a procedural writ dimension it did not possess.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries are in agreement on the essential point: de clero is the Latin title of 25 Edward III, Statute 3, and the phrase translates as "concerning the clergy." Black's first and second editions are nearly identical in their treatment, both citing 2 Reeve, Eng. Law, 378, as authority for the statute's content. Burrill's entry is truncated but corroborates the identification of the statute.
None of the historical dictionaries provide substantive analysis of what the statute's provisions actually required or how they operated in practice. For that, researchers must go directly to Reeve or to the text of the statute itself. The dictionaries function here as index entries rather than explanatory treatments — useful for identification, not for understanding.
The second edition of Black's contains an apparent typographical error at the opening of the entry, where text from a neighboring entry (a writ directing a jailer to release a prisoner on security) appears before the de clero definition. This is a scanning or pagination artifact and should be disregarded.
Jurisdictional Note
De clero was an English statute with no direct colonial reception in American law. It has no operative role in any U.S. jurisdiction. In English legal history, it is understood alongside other 14th-century ecclesiastical statutes. Researchers working in jurisdictions with civil law or mixed traditions will find no local equivalent.