the parson and the invention of the corporation sole

five different questions

the search for “the first” changes according to what is being sought; a rule allowing property to pass to successors is older than the language of corporation, and that language is older than the settled sole-and-aggregate taxonomy;

question	best-supported answer	limit
who invented succession to parochial property?	no one event or surviving name; the arrangement emerged from medieval church-property and land-law rules;	succession is not by itself a corporation sole;
who first argued that one office-name was corporate?	John Prysot or Prisot, Serjeant-at-law, is the earliest named advocate located in Maitland’s trail, in 1448;	Nicholas Aysshton JCP rejected the argument;
who first favoured a corporation of one priest?	a later abridgment attributes a favourable statement to Thomas Bryan CJCP and Richard Choke JCP in 1481–82;	Maitland called it gratuitous dictum and its apparent Year Book source was unprinted;
who first called the ordinary parson a corporation?	Sir Robert Broke is the strongest identifiable early doctrinal writer;	Maitland would not call him the father and could not show that he used the exact phrase corporation sole;
who supplied the lasting classification?	Sir Edward Coke placed King, bishop and parson within a systematic sole-and-aggregate classification;	Coke classified older material; he did not create the underlying parson rule;

the word parson before the doctrine

in its central ecclesiastical sense, parson meant the holder of a parochial benefice in full possession of its rights and dues: the rector; the word came through Middle English and Anglo-French forms of persona, from medieval Latin persōna in the sense of a parish rector;

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition

the entry parson, n., sense 1a, records English examples from about 1250; its separate etymological note says ecclesiastical Latin persōna is not found before the eleventh century and was apparently still a new use at the Council of Clermont in 1096;

the note does not identify the inventor of the corporation sole and does not use that expression;

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), parson, n., sense 1a and etymological note;

the OED etymological note: three explanations, not one settled derivation

Coke and Blackstone

the civil-law legal person

English legal writers connected persōna with the legal holder of parish property and with “the person to sue and be sued in respect of this property”;

this explains the later English legal understanding; the OED does not present it as proved original etymology;

Du Cange

personage or dignity

Du Cange connected the early equivalence of persōna and dignitās, proposing the sense of a personage, dignitary or holder of an ecclesiastical dignity;

H. Schaefer

the non-resident holder

Schaefer argued that persōna was first applied to a non-resident holder of a living—a conventual body, chapter, chapter member or sometimes a layman—while a vicarius performed the spiritual duties;

on that account, the holder occupied the character or role of parish clergyman without personally performing the work;

OED editorial inference

immortal to mortal

the editor cautiously inferred that England adopted the civil-law interpretation early because the designation extended from persōna immortālis to persōna mortālis, the resident rector, and became his legal designation;

historical significance

the suggested direction is important: the continuing collegiate or conventual holder was called the immortal person, and the name was then extended to the mortal rector; that supplies conceptual background for the later doctrine, but it is not proof that the corporation sole had already been invented;

1706 vocabulary

the OED records Phillips distinguishing a “Parson Mortal”, appointed for his life, from the continuing collegiate or conventual appropriator styled “Persona Immortalis, or Parson Immortal”; this late quotation records the mortal/immortal distinction, not its first use;

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, parson, n., sense 1a, quotation dated 1706;

the separate OED entry corporation, n.

in sense 3a the OED defines the legal corporation as a body authorised to act as one individual and preserve rights in perpetual succession; it then distinguishes an aggregate corporation of many from a sole corporation consisting of one office-holder and successors, giving king, bishop and parish parson as examples;

the first displayed quotation under that sense to state the sole-and-aggregate division is Blackstone in 1765; dictionary quotation order is evidence of the entry’s recorded examples, not proof that Blackstone coined the expression;

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, corporation, n., sense 3a;

the property problem which produced the question

a parish benefice joined an ecclesiastical office to valuable temporal interests; the serving parson possessed and benefited from them, but they were intended to remain for the next incumbent rather than pass as his private inheritance;

church and churchyard

the physical parish church and its ground were attached to the benefice, but the parish church was not consistently treated as a person able to own and litigate in the temporal courts;

parsonage and glebe

the incumbent occupied the parsonage house and held the glebe land; lawyers disputed whether his interest was for life, fee simple, a qualified fee, or something held in right of the church;

tithes and other dues

the parson received the parish revenues, yet an alienation or charge made for his own benefit could prejudice the successor;

advowson and patronage

the patron retained the right of presentation; that right did not necessarily mean that the patron owned the glebe or took its profits during a vacancy;

the recurring sequence

presentationthe patron selected and presented a clerk;
institutionthe bishop or ordinary admitted him to the spiritual office;
inductionthe clerk received formal temporal possession;
incumbencythe parson held and enjoyed the benefice during his life or tenure;
vacancydeath, resignation or removal left an interval before the next induction;

Blackstone’s later description

Blackstone described the parson as having, during his life, the freehold of the parsonage house, glebe, tithes and other dues; presentation, institution and induction produced full possession;

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, chapter XI, star pages 384 and 389–392; public transcription;

the difficult interval was the vacancy; if the dead incumbent’s heir did not inherit, and the next incumbent had not yet arrived, in whom did the freehold or fee simple rest? Answers included the patron, the parson during incumbency, the church, nobody, or an interest said to be in abeyance;

why the parson was harder than the bishop

a medieval bishop ordinarily stood at the head of a continuing aggregate body of bishop and chapter; the parish parson had no chapter or convent behind him; when the one incumbent died, no continuing group remained to provide an obvious holder in the temporal law;

Maitland’s church-law reconstruction

Maitland, following the church-law history he cited, associated Alexander III with a new juristic basis for the ius patronatus, alongside institution and induction by ecclesiastical authority and the English temporal courts’ exclusive jurisdiction over advowsons; this is Maitland’s historical reconstruction, not the wording of one medieval judgment;

his central point was that English lawyers approached the question through freehold, fee simple, succession and abeyance rather than simply accepting a canonist’s subjectified church as owner;

chronological record

this chronology records distinct stages; no row should be treated as a proved moment of invention;

chronology of the parson and corporation sole
date	recorded source or development	what it establishes
eleventh century; 1096	the OED finds no ecclesiastical use of Latin persōna before the eleventh century and cites the Council of Clermont in 1096 as evidence that the clerical use was still new;	the history of the title parson; not a corporation-sole doctrine;
c. 1250	the earliest quotation in the OED entry records Middle English persones;	the title was established in English long before the located one-office corporate arguments;
1421	Rolfe Sjt distinguished an abbey church, understood through its abbot and convent, from a parish church, which he treated as a physical house unable to take a gift; YB Hil. 8 Hen V, fol. 4, pl. 15;	evidence against assuming that the medieval temporal courts already treated every parish church as an owning person;
1430	Cottesmore, Paston, Babington, Strangways and Martin disputed the parson’s estate and the location of the interest during vacancy; YB Hil. 8 Hen VI, pl. 10, fols 24a–25a; Seipp 1430.010 facsimile;	the property puzzle existed before the corporate label;
1448	John Prysot Sjt argued that “John, Chaplain of the Chantry of St Mary of Dale” might be understood as corporate under his office-name; Nicholas Aysshton JCP rejected the pleading; YB Mich. 27 Hen VI, pl. 24, fol. 3b; Seipp 1448.024 facsimile;	earliest located named advocate of comparable one-office corporate reasoning; the argument failed;
1454	Romayn’s Chantry required parliamentary confirmation after later lawyers found the old foundation form insufficient, although it had stood for about 120 years; Rotuli Parliamentorum V, p. 258;	the legal form of chantry succession remained unstable; it does not establish a settled corporation of one priest;
1481–82	Fitzherbert later attributed to Bryan CJCP and Choke JCP the view that an authorised endowment of one chantry priest and successors made a good corporation; the printed context concerned Norwich; YB Mich. 21 Edw IV, pl. 28, fols 55b–59b; Seipp 1481.096 record;	an early favourable one-priest statement, transmitted later and treated by Maitland as incidental dictum;
1487; 1504	Keble opposed the proposition that such a licence created a corporation; Rede J later appeared to accept that a licence could do so; YB Hil. 2 Hen VII, fol. 13, pl. 16; YB Mich. 20 Hen VII, fol. 7, pl. 17;	the point remained unsettled after the Bryan and Choke dictum;
1520	Richard Broke JCP, Lewis Pollard JCP, Richard Elyot JCP and Robert Brudenell CJCP expressed materially different views about the parson’s fee and succession; YB Mich. 12 Hen VIII, pl. 1, fols 7a–9b; Seipp 1520.006ss facsimile;	even the property theory remained disputed on the eve of the Reformation;
1522	Sir John Fineux CJKB rejected the proposed corporation of one man because one man was not permanent and could not have successors; YB Mich. 14 Hen VIII, pl. 2, fols 3a–5b; Seipp 1522.011ss facsimile;	strong contrary evidence: a one-man corporation was not accepted doctrine and corporation sole was not settled terminology;
before 1558; printed posthumously (traditionally dated 1568; surviving 1573 edition documented)	Sir Robert Broke’s La Graunde Abridgement called a parson a corporation by common law and a corporation in succession;	the strongest early synthesis of the parson rules in corporate language; Maitland and several bibliographical authorities give 1568 for first publication, while the linked catalogues document a surviving 1573 printing and a 1576 reprint; none of those dates proves use of the exact phrase corporation sole;
1591	Fulwood’s Case, 4 Co Rep 64b–65a; 76 ER 1031, discussed “a sole corporation or body politic” and listed bishop, parson, vicar and master of a hospital as examples;	a recognisable late-Elizabethan classification; the actual dispute concerned the Chamberlain of London and orphanage recognizances;
1612; report 1614	Coke’s report of Sutton’s Hospital, 10 Co Rep 23a, at 29b; 77 ER 960, 968, divided every corporation into one sole person or an aggregate of many;	the lasting systematic classification; the case itself concerned an aggregate charitable corporation;
1765	Blackstone explained the parson as a corporation sole preserving church, churchyard, parsonage, glebe and tithes through successors;	the mature textbook rationale, written centuries after the development began;
1900	F. W. Maitland asked who the first true inventor had been, investigated the parson trail, and declined to name one;	the main historical reconstruction used here, together with its cautions and negative results;

the Year Book trail in detail

the Year Books record arguments and judicial discussion rather than modern authorised judgments; the status of each statement therefore matters;

1430: five judges and no agreed theory

the plaintiff’s ancestor had recovered land from an earlier parson; the defendant parson asked for the aid of the patron; the argument forced the judges to ask what estate a parson held and what remained during a vacancy;

John Cottesmore JCP treated the parson as tenant for life and placed a reversion in the patron;
William Paston JCP said a parson had fee simple and that, when the parson died, the freehold was not in the patron and no action lay until another parson arrived;
William Babington CJCP distinguished an abbey, whose house continued, from a vacant parish church and placed a right in the patron during vacancy;
James Strangways JCP and John Martin JCP opposed the aid prayer; Martin rejected the life-estate analysis;

the report shows the problem which corporate language later attempted to organise; it does not call the parson a corporation;

YB Hil. 8 Hen VI, pl. 10, fols 24a–25a; Seipp 1430.010; Maitland, “The Corporation Sole”, pp. 347–348;

1448: Prysot’s corporate-name argument was rejected

a proceeding was brought in the name of “John, Chaplain of the Chantry of St Mary of Dale” without John’s surname; the omission was challenged;

reported Law French

poet estre entende que il est corporate par tiel nom;

Maitland’s cited text: YB Mich. 27 Hen VI, fol. 3, pl. 24;

in substance, Prysot answered that John might be understood as corporate by that office-name; Aysshton rejected the pleading and the chaplain was amerced;

result: this is the earliest located named argument of its kind, but a rejected argument cannot be treated as an invention accepted by the court;

1481–82: Bryan and Choke’s favourable dictum

Sir Anthony Fitzherbert’s later Abridgement, title Graunt, pl. 30, represented Bryan CJCP and Choke JCP as saying that, if the King licensed a chantry for one priest and land was given to him and his successors, “that is a good corporation without further words”;

Maitland supplied three cautions:

the apparent authority was an unprinted Year Book;
the printed case concerned the municipal corporation of Norwich;
the single-priest statement was therefore incidental or gratuitous dictum;

Keble’s contrary view in 1487 and Rede J’s apparent later approval confirm that the point was still contested;

1520: the fee was still disputed

Richard Broke JCP said the parson held fee simple in iure ecclesiae, in right of the church;
Lewis Pollard JCP placed the fee simple in the patron, denied that there was true succession, and contrasted a gift to parson and successor with a gift to a prior and church where there was a corporation;
Richard Elyot JCP adopted an intermediate position: a fee in right of the church, but for some purposes only an estate for life;
Robert Brudenell CJCP said the parson had fee simple by succession as an heir had it by inheritance;

name caution: this Richard Broke was not Sir Robert Broke, the later Chief Justice and author of the Graunde Abridgement;

1522: Fineux rejected a corporation based on one man

Maitland’s translation of the reported reasoning

“A corporation is an aggregation of head and body: not a head by itself, nor a body by itself”;

“albeit the king desires to make a corporation of J. S., that is not good, for common reason tells us that it is not a permanent thing and cannot have successors”;

YB Mich. 14 Hen VIII, fol. 3, pl. 2; Seipp 1522.011ss; Maitland, p. 339;

Fineux’s reasoning treated the continuing organised group as the essence of corporateness; Maitland considered it incompatible with supposing that corporation sole was already current, settled terminology;

Littleton: a fee in abeyance rather than an owning office

in Tenures, sections 643, 645, 646 and 648, Littleton rejected both an ordinary fee simple in the patron and an ordinary fee simple in the parson; during vacancy he placed the right in abeyance—in legal remembrance, intendment and consideration—rather than in a separately owning office;

those succession rules preceded the later doctrine; they do not prove that Littleton used or invented corporation sole; the apparently helpful words describing another body politic in section 413 were absent from the earliest manuscript and print evidence examined by Butler and Maitland;

Sir Robert Broke: the closest early synthesizer

Sir Robert Broke or Brooke, Chief Justice of Common Pleas, died in 1558; his La Graunde Abridgement appeared posthumously and gathered medieval rules under topical headings; Maitland and several bibliographical authorities give 1568 for first publication, while the linked catalogues document a surviving 1573 printing and a 1576 reprint; the doctrinal entries necessarily pre-date Broke’s death, so the disputed printing history does not alter the doctrinal sequence;

Broke through Maitland’s translation

“one can give land to a parson and to his successors, and so this is a corporation by the common law”;

“a parson of a church is a corporation in succession to prescribe, to take land in fee, and the like”;

Broke, La Graunde Abridgement, Corporations et Capacities, pls 41 and 68; see also Encumbent et Glebe, pl. 14; translated and discussed by Maitland, pp. 336–337; Folger record for the 1573 edition; William & Mary’s digitised 1576 edition and catalogue record;

Maitland found that Broke’s cited Year Books supported the underlying rules—land could be given to a parson and successors; predecessors’ acts could matter—but did not support Broke’s new corporate language; in Maitland’s formulation, the books warranted the law but not the language;

best defensible claim

Broke is the strongest candidate if “inventor” means the earliest presently located influential writer who gathered the ordinary parson’s succession rules and expressly described the parson as a corporation;

he is not a proved inventor of the device, and he is not proved to have coined or used the precise phrase corporation sole;

the Broke name trap

Maitland’s 1900 text says “Sir Richard Broke”; the Cambridge editors identify the man in an editorial note as Sir Robert Broke; the abridgment’s title-page and catalogue likewise identify Sir Robert Brooke; Richard Broke was the different judge in the 1520 discussion;

F. W. Maitland, State, Trust and Corporation, modern Cambridge text and editorial correction;

why Littleton cannot safely be named

a passage later printed with Littleton’s Tenures appeared to describe a parson as a body politic; Maitland followed Butler in observing that the crucial words were absent from the earliest editions and from the Cambridge manuscript; he regarded attribution of those words to Sir Thomas Littleton as rash;

from late-Elizabethan example to settled classification

Fulwood’s Case, 1591

the dispute concerned the Chamberlain of the City of London and obligations for orphanage money; custom enabled the chamberlain and successors to take recognizances for that limited purpose;

reported classification

the report referred to “a sole corporation or body politic” and used bishop, parson, vicar and master of a hospital as examples; it then addressed the ordinary rule that chattels did not pass in succession to a sole corporation and the special London custom;

Fulwood’s Case, Hil. 33 Eliz., 4 Co Rep 64b–65a; 76 ER 1031;

this is evidence that the category was recognisable by 1591; it is not a report of anyone inventing the parson doctrine;

The Case of Sutton’s Hospital, 1612; report published 1614

Coke’s lasting formula

“every Corporation or Incorporation, or body Politick and Incorporate, which are all one, either stand upon one sole person, as the King, Bishop, Parson, &c. or aggregate of many”;

10 Co Rep 23a, at 29b; 77 ER 960, 968; Coke’s report in a public digitisation;

the hospital litigation concerned an aggregate charitable corporation; Coke’s sole-person examples were classificatory reasoning, not the issue which created the hospital and not a decision inventing corporation sole for the parson; Coke wrote King, not Crown, in this passage;

Blackstone’s mature explanation, 1765

Book I, chapter XVIII

“Corporations sole consist of one person only and his successors, in some particular station, who are incorporated by law”;

“the parson, quatenus parson, shall never die”;

Blackstone, Commentaries, Book I, chapter XVIII, star pages 469–470; public transcription;

Blackstone’s practical explanation was that the church, churchyard, parsonage house, glebe and tithes should remain for the successor instead of descending to the incumbent’s heir, answering his private debts, or requiring a fresh conveyance at every change;

in chapter XI he called the parson persona ecclesiae and said the church was represented through his person; the OED note requires that explanation to be presented as the later English legal interpretation of persona, not as proved original etymology;

Roman and English histories kept separate

Blackstone attributed the general invention of corporations to the Romans but wrote that Roman lawyers had no notion of the English sole corporation; the OED’s civil-law explanation of persona does not establish that Roman law contained the later English corporation sole;

the named men and what can be attributed to each

earliest named advocate located

John Prysot or Prisot

as Serjeant-at-law in 1448, he advanced the office-name corporate argument for the chantry chaplain; the judge rejected it;

judge who rejected it

Nicholas Aysshton

as a Justice of Common Pleas, he held the 1448 pleading bad; his response prevents the report being used as an accepted first corporation-sole holding;

earliest favourable dictum located

Thomas Bryan and Richard Choke

as Chief Justice and Justice of Common Pleas, they were later reported as accepting a licensed one-priest chantry corporation; the statement was incidental and later disputed;

contrary evidence

Sir John Fineux

as Chief Justice of King’s Bench in 1522, he treated a corporation based on one man as lacking the permanence and succession of a continuing body;

strongest early synthesizer

Sir Robert Broke

he expressly described the parson as a corporation and a corporation in succession; no surviving evidence proves that he coined corporation sole;

systematic classifier

Sir Edward Coke

he made sole and aggregate one of the main divisions of corporations and placed King, bishop and parson together; the underlying parson rules pre-dated him;

mature expositor

Sir William Blackstone

he supplied the familiar property-and-perpetuity explanation in 1765; he did not claim to be the inventor;

historian of the trail

Frederic William Maitland

in 1900 he separated old succession rules from new corporate vocabulary, named no inventor, and argued that the device did not neatly solve the vacancy problem;

how the language changed

the history is best understood as several layers of legal description placed over an older practical arrangement;

layer	typical wording	work performed by the wording
succession rule	a gift to a parson “and his successors”; prescription through predecessors;	allowed the benefice and its incidents to continue beyond one incumbent without yet calling him a corporation;
corporate office-name	the chaplain may be understood as corporate under that name;	attempted to let one current holder litigate in an enduring office-name; rejected in 1448;
corporation in succession	the parson is a corporation by common law or in succession;	Broke redescribed existing succession and land-holding rules in corporate vocabulary;
sole corporation	bishop, parson, vicar and certain single offices as sole corporations;	formed a recognisable category by the late sixteenth century;
sole/aggregate taxonomy	one sole person contrasted with an aggregate of many;	Coke turned examples into a general classification;
artificial-person explanation	one incumbent and successors are one person in law, maintaining perpetual succession;	Blackstone supplied the polished eighteenth-century rationale;

three possible meanings of invention

arrangement: the old rules that attached property to a benefice and its successors;

description: the move to call the one-office succession a corporation;

classification: the later doctrine that every corporation is either sole or aggregate;

the evidence supplies different men and dates for the second and third meanings, and none for a single creation of the first;

Maitland’s question and his refusal to name a father

in “The Corporation Sole”, published in volume 16 of the Law Quarterly Review in 1900, Maitland expressly asked for “the man who was the first and true inventor”; Broke appeared to be the closest candidate, but Maitland stopped short;

Maitland’s caution

“I dare not say that he was the father of ‘the corporation sole’; indeed I do not know that he ever used precisely that phrase”;

F. W. Maitland, “The Corporation Sole” (1900) 16 Law Quarterly Review 335, 336; modern Cambridge text;

the negative result matters

Maitland searched many places in the Year Books where the expression might be expected and did not find it; absence from that search cannot prove that no earlier use survives, but it prevents a confident first-use claim;

he also argued that the corporate label failed at the point where a juristic person would be most useful: when the parson died, traditional doctrine still placed the freehold in abeyance until another incumbent arrived; the corporation sole did not operate as a second, continuously owning person detached from the man;

competing modern genealogies

later scholarship has not produced one uncontested origin; Marie-France Fortin distinguishes Maitland’s parson-centred account from Ernst Kantorowicz’s history of royal dignity and the King’s two bodies and Joshua Getzler’s Bractonian property genealogy; these histories overlap, but corporation sole, royal dignity, office, and Crown should not be collapsed into one event;

Marie-France Fortin, “The king’s two bodies and the Crown a corporation sole: historical dualities in English legal thinking”, published online 12 April 2021, (2026) 52(1) History of European Ideas 40–58;

what the surviving evidence permits

it is safe to conclude

the formative English problem concerned parochial property, succession and vacancy;
the older property rules existed before the parson was routinely called a corporation;
Prysot is the earliest presently located named advocate of comparable one-office corporate reasoning;
Bryan and Choke supplied the earliest located favourable one-priest statement, but only through later transmission;
Fineux’s 1522 reasoning shows that a one-man corporation was still contestable;
Sir Robert Broke is the strongest early doctrinal synthesizer;
Coke supplied the durable classification and Blackstone the durable explanation;

the evidence does not establish

a single inventor or date of invention;
the first surviving use of the exact phrase corporation sole;
that Prysot’s 1448 argument was accepted;
that Bryan or Choke devised the wider parson doctrine;
that Sir Robert Broke used the exact later phrase;
that Coke invented the underlying device;
that Blackstone’s persona ecclesiae explanation is the settled original etymology of parson;
that the parson, King, royal dignity and Crown share one identical origin story;

answer to the inventor question

no surviving authority identifies one inventor;

John Prysot made the earliest presently located named argument in 1448; Sir Robert Broke is the earliest influential writer presently located who applied corporate language to the ordinary parson; Sir Edward Coke later systematised the doctrine;

glossary

advowson: the right of presentation to an ecclesiastical benefice;
patron: the holder of the advowson who presents a clerk when the benefice is vacant;
ordinary: the ecclesiastical authority exercising ordinary jurisdiction, commonly the diocesan bishop in this history;
benefice: an ecclesiastical office to which revenues or property are attached;
parson or rector: the incumbent with the full parochial rights and dues; parson was the particularly legal title;
vicar: historically the substitute serving where the rectory had been appropriated, usually endowed with only a portion of the revenues;
chantry: an endowed foundation for a priest to perform specified religious services, often masses for the dead; single-priest chantries supplied some of the earliest corporate disputes;
glebe: land belonging to and supporting the benefice;
tithes: the parochial dues which formed a substantial part of the rector’s revenues;
institution: ecclesiastical admission of the presented clerk to the spiritual office;
induction: formal delivery of temporal possession of the benefice;
mortmain: the holding of land in a continuing corporate or “dead hand”, engaging rules that restricted land from leaving ordinary feudal circulation;
fee simple: the largest estate recognised by the common law; lawyers struggled to locate it in the parson’s case;
abeyance: a description used where a right or fee had no present natural holder and rested in legal consideration until a holder appeared;
in iure ecclesiae: in right of the church;
persona ecclesiae: person of the church; Blackstone used it in his later explanation of the parson;
persona immortalis: the “immortal person” or continuing collegiate or conventual holder in the OED’s recorded terminology;
persona mortalis: the mortal individual rector;
corporation aggregate: a corporate body composed of more than one member and maintained through succession of members;
corporation sole: the later classification in which one office-holder and successors are treated in one continuing official capacity;

source record and edition notes

dictionary

J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (eds), Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 20 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), parson, n., etymology, sense 1a, quotations and bracketed etymological note; the edition is identified here without linking to a workstation copy;
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, corporation, n., sense 3a, for the legal definition and the aggregate/sole division; its Blackstone quotation is not treated as the first historical use;

medieval and early-modern legal sources

the Year Book reports listed above, with David J. Seipp’s record numbers 1430.010, 1448.024, 1481.096, 1520.006ss and 1522.011ss; the Boston University Year Books project explains the character and transmission of the reports;
Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, La Graunde Abridgement, title Graunt, pl. 30, preserving the Bryan and Choke statement and citing Trin. 22 Edw IV and Mich. 21 Edw IV, fol. 56;
Sir Robert Broke, La Graunde Abridgement, Corporations et Capacities, pls 41 and 68, and Encumbent et Glebe, pl. 14; Maitland and several bibliographical authorities give 1568 for first publication, while the linked catalogues document a surviving 1573 printing and a 1576 reprint;
Fulwood’s Case, Hil. 33 Eliz., 4 Co Rep 64b–65a; 76 ER 1031;
Sir Edward Coke, The Case of Sutton’s Hospital, 10 Co Rep 23a, especially 29b; 77 ER 960, especially 968; decided 1612 and reported in print in 1614;

Blackstone

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I (1765), chapter XI, especially star page 384 for persona ecclesiae, the parson’s rights and perpetual succession;
Blackstone, Book I, chapter XVIII, especially star pages 467–470 for artificial persons, aggregate and sole corporations, the Roman comparison, and the parson explanation;
the star pages identify the original pagination; the public Yale Avalon transcriptions are linked above; the consulted print comparison was the George Sharswood edition, volume I (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1893);

historical scholarship

Frederic William Maitland, “The Corporation Sole” (1900) 16 Law Quarterly Review 335–354; the central reconstruction and source trail;
Maitland, “The Crown as Corporation” (1901) 17 Law Quarterly Review 131–146; the related extension from church-property language to the King and Crown;
Marie-France Fortin, “The king’s two bodies and the Crown a corporation sole: historical dualities in English legal thinking”, published online 12 April 2021, (2026) 52(1) History of European Ideas 40–58, for the competing Maitland, Kantorowicz and Getzler genealogies;

method and source boundary

the OED note is lexicographical history, not a judicial holding; the Year Books may preserve argument, dictum and disagreement rather than a ratio in the modern sense; Fitzherbert and Broke are later abridgments; Coke’s reports and Blackstone’s Commentaries organise earlier doctrine; Maitland supplies a historical reconstruction and expressly records uncertainty;

translations and paraphrases are identified as such; a later explanation is not silently projected backwards into the medieval vocabulary;

by: david-james