I understand that ever since King John's surrender of his territory to the Pope, the Holy See technically never gave up their claim of ownership. I know they imposed taxes on England, and that Edward II and Edward III refused to pay them. My question is, did the Papacy continue to imposes taxes on them, or did they eventually stop? I'm aware of the Peter's Pence tax and how it was paid until the 1500s, but I'm referring to the tax to England from the Papacy as a vassal to its lord. Incidentally, if the original claim of ownership was never rescinded, does that mean that the United Kingdom is still under Papal rule? Could the Holy See exert any authority over it?
The last time the annual tribute was paid was in 1333, and eventually in 1365, after the papacy continued to complain about unpaid tribute, parliament ruled that since John's request for a bull of protection had lacked the support of the English bishops, it was thus never legitimate and that ended any kind of bilateral recognition of papal overlordship over any kind. The noticeable trend in the later middle ages in England more one of the Roman Church as a corporate entity granting concessions to English kings. For example, after a bit of a struggle between Edward I and Boniface VIII in 1294 - 1298, in which Edward I invoked the Roman law doctrine of necessity while Pope Boniface defended the privileges of the church in canon law, it was agreed that the English king could indeed tax his clergy of one tenth of their wealth to fund his war with Philip the Fair of France over control of Gascony (Boniface had also granted the same concessions to Philip after a lengthy pamphlet war between him and Philip's first minster, the Roman lawyer Guillaume de Nogaret). Over the course of the 14th century, the various statutes concerning praemunire between 1353 and 1392 enabled English kings to forbid clerics from appealing to the church courts when they deemed it necessary and to win back the power of bestowing benefices on bishops and abbots. At the time of the Great Western Schism (1378 - 1417) and after, it was really English kings that were leading the English church - I would highly recommend reading the excellent work done by Jeremy Catto in "Henry V" ( a collection of essays edited by G.L Hariss) and Malcolm Vale in "Henry V: the conscience of a king", as they demonstrate how English kings were beginning to lead programmes of liturgical and monastic reform in England. Thus, some historians, most notably G.L Hariss) would argue that Henry VIII's break with Rome, concluded with the act of supremacy in 1534, was not really that much of a break with what had gone on before. Either way, we must discard the old myth that the papacy its the universal church were a big obstacle in the way of the development of sovereign "national" states - late medieval popes weren't as powerful as they are in the popular imagination and were a lot more cautious and pragmatic than we give them credit for.