For centuries, English law discriminated against Catholics and Jews. Those rules were mostly repealed in the 19th century, but surprisingly the law still says that a Catholic or Jewish person cannot advise the King on appointments within the Church of England or Church of Scotland. Ordinarily, new Church of England bishops are nominated by the King on the advice of the Prime Minister, but a Catholic or Jewish Prime Minister could not exercise that function; it would have to devolve on another Minister of the Crown. The article analyses the impact of this rule today, and, drawing on two interviews, considers how this rule was applied when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. The article argues that the discriminatory rule should be repealed, allowing any Prime Minister, regardless of their faith or lack thereof, to carry out their duties in full.

Today, the Chancery Court is the appeal court for the province of York in the Church of England. There are some excellent specialised period-specific studies which take in the Chancery Court alongside other York church courts, mostly from the Borthwick Institute at York.1 However, there is no book exclusively devoted to the Chancery Court setting out its full history. The court is also rather neglected in standard texts on the history of English ecclesiastical law. Even the great Richard Helmholz has no index entry on it in his monumental history of canon law in England.2 Holdsworth in his well-known history of the common law has a page and a half on courts of the Archbishop of Canterbury; as to York’s archiepiscopal courts, he simply states they ‘corresponded’ to those of Canterbury.3 These are typical of most scholars today.4 This article, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance – to correct what seems to be a case of juridical amnesia and so to unveil the forgotten, or hidden, Chancery Court of York. It offers a short history of the identity, jurisdiction, officers, records and processes, and jurisprudence of the Chancery Court of York. It also points out some key differences between the Chancery Court and its Canterbury equivalent, the Arches Court. The article focuses mainly on its post-Reformation history, as treated in the dispersed secondary literature – and it adds to this what the English ecclesiastical lawyers since the Reformation – civilians, common lawyers, and clerical jurists – say about this York court.

For a split reductive group G we realise identities in the Grothendieck group of $\widehat{G}$-representations in terms of cycle relations between certain closed subschemes inside the affine Grassmannian. These closed subschemes are obtained as a degeneration of e-fold products of flag varieties and, under a bound on the Hodge type, we relate the geometry of these degenerations to that of moduli spaces of G-valued crystalline representations of $\operatorname{Gal}(\overline{K}/K)$ for $K/\mathbb{Q}_p$ a finite extension with ramification degree e. By transferring the aforementioned cycle relations to these moduli spaces we deduce one direction of the Breuil–Mézard conjecture for G-valued crystalline representations with small Hodge type.