Definition
Reviling church ordinances was a criminal offense in English law consisting of the act of speaking contemptuously, mockingly, or abusively against the rites, ceremonies, and established practices of the Church of England. The offense belonged to a broader category of crimes against religion and public morality that English common law and statutory authority recognized as punishable by the state, reflecting the historical union of church and state in England. It was distinct from blasphemy (which targeted the Christian faith or the divine itself) and from heresy (which involved holding unorthodox doctrines); reviling church ordinances was specifically directed at contemptuous attacks on the institutional ceremonies and practices of the established church.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical English legal sources. Researchers encountering it in older treatises, indictments, or ecclesiastical court records should understand several navigational points.
First, the offense reflects the pre-separation-of-church-and-state legal framework of England. It has no direct American counterpart, because the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and the general structure of American constitutional law precluded the transplantation of religion-based criminal offenses tied to a state church. Researchers working on colonial American materials may find echoes of the concept, but they should not assume direct equivalence.
Second, the offense sits at the intersection of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and common law criminal jurisdiction. In the older English system, some offenses against religion were tried in ecclesiastical courts, others in common law courts. Reviling church ordinances was treated as a temporal offense — cognizable by the common law courts — not merely a matter for church discipline. This distinction matters when tracing how charges were brought and how they were reported in historical records.
Third, the Rapalje & Lawrence entry for this term is fragmentary: the headword appears to have been split across the page, with the term rendered as "NANCES" — a truncation of "ORDINANCES" — following the entry title "REVILING CHURCH ORDI." Researchers using digitized or reprinted versions of that dictionary should be alert to this pagination artifact, which can make the entry difficult to locate or properly interpret in keyword searches.
Fourth, the severity of the offense varied over time. By the period Rapalje & Lawrence cite (Stephen's Commentaries, 7th edition), it was treated as a relatively minor criminal matter punishable by fine and imprisonment, not as a capital or ecclesiastical offense. Earlier periods treated similar conduct with considerably greater severity. Researchers working across different centuries should be careful not to project the nineteenth-century treatment backward.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence define the offense succinctly as "an offense against religion, punishable in England by fine and imprisonment," citing Stephen's Commentaries (4 Steph. Com. (7th ed.) 208). This entry is brief and descriptive rather than analytical. The citation to Stephen's Commentaries is the authoritative backbone: Sir James Fitzjames Stephen's treatment in that work reflects the Victorian-era codification and rationalization of older common law offenses against religion, placing reviling church ordinances alongside blasphemy, profanity, and similar offenses in a coherent taxonomy.
Historical sources generally do not distinguish sharply between this offense and related ones such as blasphemous libel or profane speaking, and the boundaries were not always rigorously maintained in practice. Modern legal dictionaries largely omit the term, treating it as a historical curiosity without contemporary operative significance in any common law jurisdiction. Researchers should not expect cross-references in twentieth- or twenty-first-century dictionaries.
Jurisdictional Note
This offense was specific to English law and the established Church of England. It has no recognized counterpart in American federal or state law and was not received as part of the common law in American jurisdictions in any operative sense. Scottish, Irish, and other Commonwealth jurisdictions had analogous but not identical frameworks tied to their own established or recognized churches.