In the most general sense, penal is the body of laws that are enforced by the State in its own name and impose penalties for their violation, as opposed to civil law that seeks to redress private wrongs. This usage is synonymous with criminal law and is covered in that article.
In some jurisdictions, such as Canada, penal law is distinct from criminal law even if it encompasses this last field. This is a result of federalism: only the federal Parliament has the legislative power to enact criminal law statutes, yet provinces can also attach penal dispositions to their non-criminal statutes so they will be respected.
More specifically, the Penal laws were a set of laws which punished nonconformism in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
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In English history, penal law refers to a specific series of laws that sought to uphold the establishment of the Church of England against Protestant nonconformists and Roman Catholics, by imposing various forfeitures, civil penalties, and civil disabilities upon these dissenters. Some examples of these laws are:
While some of the Penal Laws were much older, they took their most drastic shape during the reign of Charles II. Four of them became known as the Clarendon Code, after Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, though he was not their author and did not fully approve of them.[1] These included:
Combined with the Test Act, the Corporation Acts excluded all nonconformists from holding civil or military office, and prevented them from being awarded degrees by the universities of Cambridge and Oxford.
The Penal Laws were introduced into Ireland in the year 1695 (having been in use in other countries before this). They had a pronounced effect, disenfranchising the majority of the Irish population, who were Roman Catholic or Presbyterian and in favour of the minority established Church of Ireland. Though the laws also affected adherents of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (who were concentrated in Ulster), their principal victims were members of the Roman Catholic Church, meaning over three quarters of the people on the island. The British had punished the faith of the overwhelming majority of the "mere Irish" (in contemporary English, 'mere' meant 'pure' or 'fully').
The laws were eventually repealed largely due to Irish political agitation organised under Daniel O'Connell in the 1820s, but effects of the laws in terms of sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants can still be seen, particularly in Northern Ireland, today.