Although the contours of fidei laesio (pleas for debt in ecclesiastical courts) were established by Helmholz and suggestions about the wider impact on credit relationships were offered by Briggs, there still remains scope for a detailed examination of the causes in an ecclesiastical court to establish precisely the extent of the litigation in those fora, the composition of the litigants, the character of the debts, and the incentives and impediments to actions (although Helmholz broadly indicated these issues). Accordingly, an examination has been undertaken of two extant registers of the Lichfield consistory court (1464–1478) which survive for the period of maximum referral to these courts by lay (and clerical) creditors and debtors. The information allows a new perspective on the character of the credit relationships prosecuted in the consistory court.

During the later Middle Ages the ecclesiastical jurisdiction generally abandoned ritual humiliation in the market place as an integral part of penance imposed by sentence in its courts, although intermittently this punishment continued into the early sixteenth century. In the early decades of the ecclesia anglicana of Elizabeth, however, several jurisdictions reintroduced shaming in the market place as a consistent part of a disciplinary regime. Although constituting no more than an episode, as public penance had again declined by the 1580s, the reintroduction of penance in the public forum reveals much about the character of the Anglican Church in the first decades after the settlement of 1558, but also reflects back on the pre-Reformation Church.