benefit of clergy

American  

noun

1. the rites or sanctions of a church.

2. formal marriage.

   living together withoutbenefit of clergy.

3. the privilege claimed by church authorities to try and punish, by an ecclesiastical court, any member of the clergy accused of a serious crime. The privilege was abolished in the U.S. in 1790 and in England in 1827.

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benefit of clergy British  

noun

1. sanction by the church

   marriage without benefit of clergy

2. (in the Middle Ages) a privilege that placed the clergy outside the jurisdiction of secular courts and entitled them to trial in ecclesiastical courts

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Etymology

Origin of benefit of clergy

First recorded in 1480–90

Example Sentences

I was completely alone — without benefit of clergy — in the eerie and, at the same time, sublime Wells Cathedral in southwest England in 2016.

From Washington Post • Aug. 12, 2021

Several French soldier and civilian bachelors married the elder daughters of other prisoners in ceremonies held without benefit of clergy.

From Time Magazine Archive

Venetians in the Levant when bartering was done with benefit of clergy so that polite thieving was sanctified.

From Time Magazine Archive

Huxley died in 1895, at 70, and was buried without official benefit of clergy.

From Time Magazine Archive

Two of the robbers were in a position to claim benefit of clergy; Thomas Talbot, an Irishman, was nowhere to be found; and the fourth, Richard Brerelay, escaped for the moment by turning King’s evidence.

From Chaucer and His England by Coulton, G. G.