Word.ws English Dictionary

benefit of clergy

benefit of clergy noun: 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.

Noun

benefit of clergy (uncountable)

  1. (UK, 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.
    • It will be seen that what the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. That artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people.1944, George Orwell, Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali

Questions about benefit of clergy

What does benefit of clergy mean?
Benefit of clergy means 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.
What part of speech is benefit of clergy?
Benefit of clergy is a noun.

Words near benefit of clergy in the dictionary

  1. benefit cliffs
  2. benefit club
  3. benefit clubs
  4. benefit corporation
  5. benefit corporations
  6. benefit of clergy
  7. benefit of doubt
  8. benefit of inventory
  9. benefit of the doubt
  10. benefit segmentation
  11. benefit societies

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: benefit of clergy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “benefit of clergy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/benefit_of_clergy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.