Law Reform in England and New England, 1620 to 1660

Abstract

I N the seventeenth century Sir Edward Coke and his disciples believed that the common law of England represented the perfection of human reason; as a result, there was no compelling need or justification for tampering with its intricacies. Lawyers participated extensively in the disputes over parliamentary and royal sovereignty but showed little enthusiasm for substantive changes in legal procedure. At times, leaders like Oliver Cromwell and Sir Matthew Hale suggested that law reform was a nice idea but not really practicable or desirable on a large scale. Historians of the law have tended to follow this lead in arguing that the Puritan Revolution had little influence on English law. Sir William Holdsworth's sixteen-volume history of English law devotes only a few pages to law reform during the period of the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. Theodore F. T. Plucknett's survey disposes of the subject in a few sentences.' Traditional legal histories give the impression that law reform and revolution were not proper activities for the gentlemen of the bench and bar. Other historians, however, have devoted more serious attention to the movement for law reform in seventeenth-century England. Several excellent monographs have illuminated the extraordinary variety of legal grievances in Stuart England and the even greater diversity of legal reforms proposed after i640, affecting nearly every dispute at the time about politics, the constitution, society, economics, and religion. Such indispensable studies have pro-