benefit of clergy

English

Noun

benefit of clergy (uncountable)

  1. (Britain, law, historical) A legal provision by which clergymen (and, later, anybody who could read) could claim that they were outside the jurisdiction of the secular courts and be tried instead in an ecclesiastical court under canon law.
This article is issued from Wiktionary. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.