Definition
The archbishops and bishops of the Church of England who sit in the House of Lords by virtue of their ecclesiastical office, not by hereditary peerage. They form the ecclesiastical component of the upper chamber of the British Parliament, distinguished from the Temporal Lords, who hold seats by hereditary right or royal appointment. As of the relevant historical period, the Spiritual Lords comprised the two archbishops (Canterbury and York) and a fixed number of diocesan bishops, giving the established church a formal legislative voice.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in historical English constitutional and ecclesiastical law sources. Researchers will encounter it in materials addressing the composition of the House of Lords, the relationship between church and state in England, and the legislative authority of Parliament. It is not a term of American law; colonial and post-Revolutionary American legal materials have no domestic equivalent, as the establishment of religion and the merging of ecclesiastical office with legislative authority were structures the American constitutional framework explicitly rejected.
The number of bishops entitled to sit has changed over time through statute. The Bishoprics Act 1878 fixed the number of bishop-peers at 26 (the two archbishops plus 24 bishops in order of seniority of consecration), which remains the operative limit under modern law. Researchers working with pre-1878 sources may encounter different compositions and should not assume the historical arrangement matches the modern one.
For corpus researchers, the term functions as a marker of English constitutional history and requires awareness that primary sources from different centuries reflect different statutory configurations. The term also appears in treatises discussing parliamentary privilege, the distinction between temporal and spiritual jurisdiction, and the history of ecclesiastical courts. When a source discusses parliamentary voting, quorum, or composition of the Lords, the presence or absence of Spiritual Lords may be constitutionally significant to the argument being made.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionaries surveyed — Black's, Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier's — are in complete agreement on the substantive definition: the Spiritual Lords are the archbishops and bishops of the upper house of the English Parliament. All three anchor the definition to the same cluster of secondary sources, namely Stephen's Commentaries on the Laws of England and Blackstone's Commentaries (cited in Rapalje & Lawrence as "Br. & Had. Com.," a reference to the Blackstone and Haddan edition). The consistency across these dictionaries reflects the term's settled, descriptive character — it was never a contested legal concept, only a constitutional fact of English parliamentary structure.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the statutory evolution of the Spiritual Lords' composition, the legal consequences of disestablishment debates in the nineteenth century, or any comparison to analogous structures elsewhere. They treat the term as a fixed institutional label, which is appropriate for their purpose but leaves the researcher without guidance on how the underlying institution changed across the periods those same sources otherwise cover.
Jurisdictional Note
This is exclusively a term of English constitutional and ecclesiastical law. It has no equivalent in American law, Scots law (where the established church has a presbyterian structure with no bishops), or the laws of most other common law jurisdictions. Researchers working in American legal history may encounter the term in treatises that drew heavily on English sources, such as early editions of Kent's Commentaries, but only as descriptive background, never as operative domestic law.