articles compiled at the order of the English king Henry II that limited the jurisdiction of the English ecclesiastical courts and subordinated them to secular royal courts.
The articles, 16 in all, were discussed at a council of the feudal nobility in Clarendon in January 1164. They were attacked by the head of the church, the Archbishop of Canterbury T. Becket. After Becket’s condemnation and his flight at the end of 1164, the articles were officially adopted. However, when Becket was murdered in 1170, Henry II was forced by the threat of papal excommunication in 1172 to abandon them.