Churches Weren't Sanctuaries In Tudor England

We know that playwright William Shakespeare's father avoided going to church, and we also know why he did so. 

He was worried about being arrested at the local church in connection with a now obsolete remedy for non-payment of a private debt upon which a judgment had been entered by a sheriff called a "body execution" (which has some similarities to holding someone in civil contempt for failure to pay a debt, usually a child support debt, although now, this is only permitted, at least in theory, when the debtor has an actual ability to pay the debt).

This information comes from an official report commissioned by the Queen's Privy Council in 1592 of seditionists (mostly people upset over the formation of the Church of England that had broken away from the Roman Catholic Church not all that much earlier), and of other disreputable people in Stratford. 

This report was intended to identify people who were or might aid people that we would call today suspected terrorists and terrorist sympathizers and to distinguish them from ordinary ne'er-do-wells in the area to clarify that the low threat individuals had also been investigated and vetted.

It is a reminder that the role of churches as a sanctuary from civilian law enforcement officers, which still has some non-binding practical force today in the United States, is less ancient than it is often portrayed as being.

[The playwright's father] John Shakespeare was . . . one of a group who “come not to church for fear of process for debt” – that is, to avoid being jailed for failing to repay his creditors.

In Tudor England it was illegal for sheriffs to enter private homes to make arrests; their sting operations were conducted at parish churches. From the late 1570s through the 1590s, when John Shakespeare was sued repeatedly for debt and multiple warrants were issued for his arrest, sheriffs would have waited for him at Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church. In other words, he had good reason to stay away. . . . to describe John Shakespeare as a man who avoided church in order to avoid arrest was their way of saying that he was not a “wilful” recusant—that is, not absent by choice.

From the Oxford University Press Blog.