VIII: Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761)

Oxford and Cambridge, England's two historical universities, along with the Inns of Court in London, supplied significant impetus to the drama of early modern England. The University of Oxford traces its origins to 1230, the University of Cambridge to 1260. The two universities are best thought of, however, as federations of constituent colleges, each of which had its own history and character. All four Inns of Court, which are not ‘inns’ in the usual meaning of the word but voluntary societies dedicated to the practice and teaching of English common law, trace their histories back to the fourteenth century. The four inns are Gray's Inn, the Inner Temple, Lincoln's Inn, and the Middle Temple. Up to 1642, records survive of some 384 entertainment events at Cambridge, 185 at Oxford, and 125 at the Inns of Court. Cambridge and Oxford colleges went on performing plays until the 1640s, while the Inns of Court turned to revels and masques.

Alan H. Nelson and John R. Elliott, Jr., eds. Inns of Court: Records of Early English Drama. 3 vols. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. xcix + 1064 + maps and illustrations. $340.00. Inns of Court was prepared by two of REED's veteran editors. John R. Elliott, Jr., to whose memory the collection is dedicated, also edited REED's Oxford records, and Alan H. Nelson, who co-edited the collection after Elliott suffered a stroke, also edited REED's Cambridge records. Twenty-second in the REED series, this new collection provides access to a wealth of records and texts from one of London's most significant cultural institutions. The Inns of Court are residential law societies located just West of London near the royal courts of justice in Westminster. Since the Middle Ages they have been the principal sites for legal education, having the right to admit individuals to practice at the bar. Sir George Buck (d. 1622) referred to them as the third university of England, and there are similarities. Like Cambridge and Oxford, the sites of the Inns were walled enclosures that included chambers, chapels, yards, walks, gardens, and great halls, and like university students, the gentlemen who resided at the Inns were pursuing an education. But, as Alan Nelson points out (xiv), important differences stamped the Inns with a distinct character. They had no founders or royal charters, no endowments, and little land other than their individual sites. They operated on annual dues charged to members, admissions fees, rents, and fines. Since there were no scholarships, entry was ordinarily limited to the upper social ranks, and the average age of admission was older because many of the residents were university graduates before entering. R is a measure of the seriousness afforded legal education that barristers were supposed to return to the Inns to participate in reading exercises and disputations at regular intervals. But not who resided at the Inns aspired to practice. Many came to learn about the law better to manage their own family estates or simply to enjoy the pleasures of London. At the turn of the seventeenth century it has been estimated that there were over a thousand members residing at the Inns, which made them the largest single group of literate, cultured men in London (xv), a group that would be of interest in almost any study of the culture, but one of particular interest to historians of drama and theater, because the Inns were noted for their extravagant festivals and entertainments. Lawyers were encouraged to incorporate theatrical activities into the rhythm of their annual training not simply because they developed facility and poise in public speaking, but also, as Henry VIII's royal commission on the Inns reported (62), because they made familiar traditional practices in the houses of the nobility and at court. Elliott and Nelson's collection presents evidence of a rich array of entertainments at the Inns from music to dance to revelry, as well as to plays and masques, some of which had a significant impact on the development of those forms. In volume 1 Nelson surveys the historical background of the Inns and the music, drama, festivals, and entertainments produced there. The earliest records to survive date from 1407-8 and they continue to 1642, arranged throughout under the four Inns of Court in alphabetical order--Gray's, Inner Temple, Lincoln's, Middle Temple--followed by Furnival's Inn (1-362), the single Inn of Chancery included. The editors' object was to select from the archival sources all references to dramatic, quasi-dramatic, and secular entertainment, including revels, interludes, disguisings, plays, comedies, tragedies, masques, orations, processions, secular music, dancing as well as the shooting of cannon and other quasi-military activities such as barriers within the halls of the several Inns themselves. Also included are processions through London, attendances at royal jousts, and performances at court (lxxxiii). …

This Handbook triangulates the disciplines of history, legal history, and literature to produce a new, interdisciplinary framework for the study of early modern England. For historians of early modern England, turning to legal archives and learning more about legal procedure has seemed increasingly relevant to the project of understanding familial and social relations as well as political institutions, state formation, and economic change. Literary scholars and intellectual historians have also shown how classical forensic rhetoric formed the basis both of the humanist teaching of literary composition (poetry and drama) and of new legal epistemologies of fact-finding and evidence evaluation. In addition, the post-Reformation jurisdictional dominance of the common law produced new ways of drawing the boundaries between private conscience and public accountability. This Handbook brings historians, literary scholars, and legal historians together to build on and challenge these and similar lines of inquiry. Chapters in the Handbook consider the following topics in a variety of combinations: forensic rhetoric, poetics, and evidence; humanist and legal learning; political and professional identities at the Inns of Court; poetry, drama, and visual culture; local governance and legal reform; equity, conscience, and religious law; legal transformations of social and affective relations (property, marriage, witchcraft, contract, corporate personhood); authorial liability (libel, censorship, press regulation); rhetorics of liberty, slavery, torture, and due process; nation, sovereignty, and international law (the British archipelago, colonialism, empire).

George Herbert's Country Parson and the Enclosure of Professional Fields by Ronald W. Cooley The study of professions and professional discourses has become increasingly important to historians and literary historians of early modern England, professionals who are themselves jockeying for position on the boundary between adjacent disciplines. The skeptical response of many historians to literary "New Historicism," with its heavy reliance on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, illustrates both the late-twentieth-century professional jostling, and the need for further research into professions and professionalism. HistorianDavid Cressy has insisted that to think of Stuart England in Foucault's terms, "to argue from France to England, and from the 1780s to the 1610s, is an exercise in anachronism and dislocation," largely because early modern England lacked the professional and bureaucratic machinery to implement the sort of "panoptic" system of social control Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.1 Such a position depends, at least in part, on the prevailing view that the rise of professions is closely linked to the beginnings of urbanization and industrialization in eighteenth-century England.2 But many historians of early modern England have challenged this view in the last fifteen years or so, exploring the training, practice, and social role of the emerging professions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in rural as well as urban areas.3 It seems increasingly clear that if early modern England had not developed the professions as instruments of social control, it was in the process of doing so. If this point is implied by the emergence of "semi-independent professional hierarchies" as an increasingly prominent feature of the English social order, it is confirmed by the sweeping ambitions registered in professional handbooks like George Herbert's A Priest to The Temple, or, The Country Parson His Character, andRule ofHoly Life!' At one point in the book, Herbert declares that "The Countrey Parson desires to be all to his Parish, and not only a Pastour, but a Lawyer also, and a Phisician."5 The statement is part of a web of allusions to, and borrowings from, the burgeoning early modern discourse of callings and professions, the raw material out of which Herbert fashions his portrait of an idealized rural clergyman.6 Indeed 2 Ronald W. Cooley the book implicitly remarks on its own composition when Herbert writes that The Country Parson is full of all knowledg. They say, it is an ill Mason that refuseth any stone: and there is no knowledg, but, in a skilfull hand, serves either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other knowledge, (p. 228) Herbert puts his precept into practice, employing his knowledge of law and medicine, "to illustrate some other knowledge," in this case the knowledge of "the Dignity . . . and the Duty" (p. 225) of a parish clergyman in the Church of England. But Herbert's reliance on legal and medical terminology does more than demonstrate his facility for similitudes. The analogies and distinctions between the priest, the physician, and the lawyer register The Country Parson's participation in a complex struggle for professional and discursive territory. A sense of the book's audience and of the social forces that helped to produce it is important here. The Country Parson is often read through the lens of the Civil War, as an idyllic portrait of the golden age in the Church of England. Completed in 1632, and surely intended for an audience of contemporaries, the book was published in Herbert's Remains in 1652, almost two decades after Herbert's death. Needless to say, a great deal had changed in the religious life of England in these two decades. The 1652 volume, and the second edition of 1671, contained prefatory material by Barnabus Oley, an ejected Laudian clergyman. Oley's nostalgia has colored subsequent responses to the text, though ironically, as Daniel Doerksen has shown, it was probably Oley's "Arminian party . . . that prevented the publication of The Country Parson much earlier, say in 1639."7 If we move beyond Laudian nostalgia and consider the forces shaping Herbert's sense of the Church of England in the 1620s and early 1630s, we can begin to see The Country...

Reviewed by: William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century Jason Taliadoros Prest, Wilfrid, William Blackstone: Law and Letters in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008; hardback; pp. xvii, 355; 4 b/w illustrations, 18 colour plates; R.R.P. AU$61.95, £29.99; ISBN 9780199550296. The Commentaries on the Laws of England that first appeared in four volumes between 1765 and 1768 (and never out of print since) arguably represents one of the greatest textbooks on the English common law. Despite this, their author Sir William Blackstone, has been relatively neglected by historians and biographers: the man himself remains largely a mystery. Professor Wilfrid Prest’s scholarship has rectified this in a series of articles, a 2006 edition [End Page 263] of Blackstone’s letters, and now this definitive biography. Prest’s principal achievements have been both to contextualize Blackstone’s life and works in the social, intellectual, and political milieu of eighteenth-century England and to bring to bear from the disparate archives almost every relevant primary source material. In a work of exacting scholarship and refined prose, Prest provides a chronological survey and assessment of the life and activities of Blackstone. In doing so, he has laid the foundations for all further study of matters Blackstonian. ‘A Young Man of Brilliant Parts’ (Chapter 2), Blackstone excelled in the literary arts, as well as Greek and Latin, at London’s Charterhouse School. And ‘notwithstanding the diminished educational and moral reputation of Oxford’ (p. 26) at the time, in 1738 at fifteen he entered Pembroke College to prepare for the degree of Bachelor of Arts. But once ‘[r]emoved to the University’ (Chapter 3) he abandoned this for the study of civil (or Roman) law eighteen months later. A further eighteen months later in late 1741, he was admitted as a student of the Middle Temple, then a means of progression to legal practice on the completion of five years’ standing there. In 1743, he was elected as a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, graduating with the BCL in 1745. On Prest’s account, it is from this time that Blackstone divided his residency ‘[b]etween the University and the Temple’ (Chapter 4). Although he initially took up chambers at the Inns of Court in London until he was admitted to practise as a barrister in late 1746, he thereafter resided principally at All Souls. This no doubt explains why, in the period 1744 to 1753, Blackstone saw few legal briefs come his way in the London courts. Further, Prest notes that this period coincided with him ‘[a]dvancing the Interests of the College’ (Chapter 5) in a zealous pursuit of administrative matters. His reformist tendencies, rewarding merit at the expense of privilege, is a chapter hitherto little known in Blackstone’s life and remarkable in the eighteenth-century context. On taking his Doctorate in Laws in 1750, Blackstone’s activities now involved the ‘General Benefit of the University at Large’ (Chapter 6). This took the form of his continuing engagement in university administrative and legal matters and, for the first time, a course of lectures at Oxford on the common law. At this stage, he quit the London Bar to focus on the possibility of academic employment at Oxford. Blackstone and his Commentaries have perhaps never fully recovered from Jeremy Bentham’s famous attack in 1776: ‘Bentham’s Blackstone replaced the conscientious and upright scholar, judge, and public man with an even more two-dimensional caricature; that of failed barrister turned stodgy Tory academic and confused textbook apologist for the British constitution [End Page 264] and unreformed common law’ (p. 9). Prest’s account provides a careful and nuanced corrective to this view. Jason Taliadoros School of Law Deakin University Copyright © 2011 Jason Taliadoros

This article follows the professional life of a Scottish colonial judge, Gilchrist Alexander, from his time as a pupil in the Middle Temple in the 1890s to his appointment as a colonial legal officer in Fiji, based on his memoirs. Between 1907 and 1920, apart from a two-year period of war service, he served as a chief police magistrate in Fiji, and also acted as attorney general and chief justice. The article focuses on Alexander’s memories of his formative years in London, which profoundly shaped his future legal outlook, as well as on his time as a colonial legal officer, providing insights into the practice of law in the Inns of Court and colonial Fiji, as well as in the British empire more widely. The main theme explored in the article is an exploration of the tensions experienced by a colonial judge between contrasting identities, first as a member of the Colonial Legal Service and, and second, as a colonist. An important part of this analysis is Alexander’s struggle to remain detached from members of the colonial administration as well as from local Fijians. Alexander also sought to highlight the difference between members of the Colonial Legal Service who were experienced barristers before being posted to the colonies and government lawyers who had merely been called to the Bar; his close ties with the Inns of Court, in particular the Middle Temple, endured throughout his life and were possibly stronger than those forged in the colonies.

This paper examines whether the canon law legal system used objective standards to judge human behaviour. The focus of this paper is on canon law before the revision of the Corpus Juris Canonici in 1582 AD. The author evaluates whether objective standards, such as the reasonable person standard of English common law, are also prevalent in canon law. The paper begins by defining the terms 'canon law' and 'ecclesiastical law' and briefly discussing the historical influence of ecclesiastical law on the English legal system. The author shows that the Didascalia Apostolorum, a handbook for the churches written around c 250 AD, used a fictitious 'wise man' as an objective standard to judge human behaviour.

The introduction argues for the importance of language-learning and multilingualism in the history of early modern England. English-speakers who ventured beyond Dover could not rely on English and had to become language-learners, while even at home English urban life was often multilingual. It brings together early modern concepts of linguistic ability with approaches from sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and the social history of language in order to show how we can think about linguistic competence in a historical perspective. It demonstrates the importance of ‘questions of language’ to the social, cultural, religious, and political histories of early modern England, and to the question of England’s place in a rapidly expanding world. After an overview of the book’s structure, aims, and parameters, it closes by asking how taking a polyglot perspective might shift our understandings of early modern English history.

Of all the crown courts in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, the chancery court has received the most favourable judgement from historians. Through its exercise of equity, the chancery court has been perceived as a mediator between English common law and Gaelic customary law. Equity provided the chancellor with the possibility of considering a judgement from the point of view of ‘reason and conscience’, to ensure what W. J. Jones has called the ‘protection of the innocent from the ruthless specifications’ of common law courts. In Irish terms this meant that the chancellor was prepared to consider Gaelic forms of partible inheritance from the standpoint of equity. In Gaelic society land descended according to a variety of customs which, it was argued in chancery, had been observed ‘time out of mind’ in a particular family or region and therefore in fairness or equity might be upheld even if they were contrary to common law practice.This benign view of the Irish chancery court’s attitude to Gaelic customary law has much in common with the attitude of the English chancery court towards women. Historians of early modern England have portrayed chancery as a judicial forum which provided women with legal redress which would have been denied them at common law. Female litigants in the sixteenth-century English chancery court included single, widowed and married women. Under common law, only single women and widows were entitled to legal representation in their own right. Married women, as femmes couvertes, were legally merged with their husbands on marriage, and so could not bring cases in their own name at common law. In the English chancery court, however, a small number of married women were permitted at the discretion of the chancellor to sue on their own without their husbands. In the course of the sixteenth century the English chancery also contributed to the extension of the legal franchise of women.

HISTORIANS are rightly suspicious of axioms, those capsules of historical ‘truth’ that pass into the received wisdom about a particular time period. Part of our job is to explode historical myth, to scrutinise and re-evaluate existing versions of the past. Yet how hard it is to think outside of the paradigms that are the legacy of an impressive bibliography and a legion of footnotes. I myself became aware of one particular paradigm regarding the cultural history of early modern England in the course of postgraduate research. I found myself straying across one of those temporal boundaries that arises from the chronological fragmentation imposed by textbooks and course syllabuses. In short, I moved from the pre-Civil-War period, with which I was then more familiar, into the early years of the long eighteenth century. It appeared to me that the literary sources from the late 1600s, which were the subject of my doctoral research, had much in common with the popular literature of earlier periods – the almanacs and chapbooks so well described by Bernard Capp, Margaret Spufford and others. The popular press of the last quarter of the seventeenth century seemed familiar territory: monstrous births, providential occurrences, and various forms of advice to young people were as much the staple diet for readers of cheap print in late seventeenth-century London as they had been in the era of Gouge and Whateley. The observation of such continuities had little relevance, however, since the preoccupation of historians studying this later period had changed.

Many twentieth-century historians of early modern England have assumed that ecclesiastical jurisdication was a lost cause after the Restoration, and thus, in contrast to earlier periods, there has been little research on eighteenth-century ecclesiastical courts. However, an examination of the Correction Court records for the Diocese of Carlisle between 1704 and 1758 and a summary survey of other dioceses suggest that such archives may prove useful for historians. This article uses the Carlisle Correction Court archive to study the charges which were brought to the court in the first half of the eighteenth century and, after a brief description of the social and economic setting, looks at the characteristics of the people brought to book.

The History of Secret Histories Brian Cowan (bio) Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell, editors The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820 cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017 xii + 282 pages; isbn: 9781107150461 Peter Burke Secret History and Historical Consciousness: From Renaissance to Romanticism brighton, u.k.: edward everett root, 2016 ix + 259 pages; isbn: 9781911204381 the history of "secret histories" is no longer much of a secret. The last two decades have seen a growing body of historical and literary scholarship devoted to detailing the growth and the significance of this particular genre. The history of secret histories appeals for many reasons. The secret history stands at the intersection of several different modes of fiction and nonfiction writing, and it became prominent at roughly the same time that other well-known genres emerged, especially the fictional novel and new forms of factual narratives that attended to the problems of proof needed to persuade readers they were "true." It appeared at the boundaries between fact and fiction, and between public and private worlds. If, for an earlier generation of scholars, this generic and epistemic uncertainty made these stories appear unsettling, not easily categorizable, and hence best dismissed as unreliable or confidently ignored as unimportant, they now fascinate scholars who are interested in exploring such liminal texts. Just as attention to the historical contexts in which literature was created and received has become largely uncontroversial in literary studies, a reciprocal awareness of the constructedness of historical narratives has allowed [End Page 121] historians to appreciate that the boundaries between fact and fiction are never clear-cut, especially before the "rise of fictionality" in the later eighteenth century.1 The recent publication of two collections of essays affords a window into the ways in which both literary and historical scholars have approached secret histories. Although such studies depend on the work of scholars from both fields, there are some striking differences between literary and historical approaches. While it might be an exaggeration to say that there are two distinct histories of the secret history, there seem to be at least two styles of writing about it. The first is literary, and this tradition is best exemplified by Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell's remarkably wide-ranging and insightful collection of essays, The Secret History in Literature, 1660–1820. The second is political, and Peter Burke's Secret History and Historical Consciousness introduces some of the concerns of this style. An interest in the historical significance of the form is particularly prominent among political historians of early modern England and France. What was a secret history? Literary and political historians tend to have slightly different understandings of the term, and this may account for their distinct approaches. In Bullard and Carnell's volume, as in literary history more generally, it is treated as a particular form of historical storytelling anchored by notions of authorship, canon, and genre. These scholars trace the emergence and development of the secret history genre by studying the reception and adaptation of certain key texts. Although they disagree about precisely which texts are "key" to the canon, scholars who treat secret histories as literature generally take this approach. Perhaps paradoxically, literary accounts tend therefore to be more "historical," in the sense of being rooted in a particular place and time, than the studies produced by political historians. Thus Rebecca Bullard elsewhere defines the genre as "a polemical form of historiography that flourished during the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth."2 By contrast, political historians of secret histories tend to see them as part of a certain style of political thinking, something akin to what Richard Hofstadter identified in the American context as a "paranoid style."3 This stylistic approach sees such stories as the product of a view of politics that is above all suspicious. Secret histories [End Page 122] are obsessed with duplicity and dedicated to unmasking the disguises adopted by political actors—not only the deceitful actions of those in government but also the ruses adopted by those seeking to undermine an established regime. They see people as naturally inclined to deception and tending to corruption. This view of human nature...

Among the navy officers sent by the Chinese government to study in Europe in 1886, Lo Tsong Yao and Chang Ping Kui were the only two that pursued a systematic legal education at the Middle Temple in London, and were successfully called to the English Bar to attain the coveted title of Barristers at Law, a first of such achievements in the history of the Chinese Navy. Upon their return to China, Lo went on to be an outstanding diplomat while Chang pursued a career as a Qing Government educational official. Their experience was undoubtedly of great historical value, yet official records kept in relation to the Chinese Educational Mission in Europe did not contain any detail as to their precise course of study and academic achievements in London. This paper thus attempts to fill this void by tracing these two navy scholars’ footprints in England to map out their legal education trajectory at the Middle Temple, in a bid to uncover a chapter in the buried history of how China’s early navy officers and diplomats were educated and trained in London’s Inn of Court.

The legal framework of the Church of England subsists in formal legal texts created not only by the church's internal legislators but also by the state, and technical terms have been devised to classify these as canon law and ecclesiastical law. On the other hand, many regulatory instruments governing the church exist outside formal texts legislated by the church and state: these may be classified as ecclesiastical quasi-legislation. The Roman Catholic Church, which is not formally established in the same sense as the Church of England, is regulated similarly by internally made canon law and by rules legislated by the state. For both churches, the degree to which regulatory instruments are binding and enforceable depends on the status of the instrument in question. With respect to jurisprudence, the fundamental authority underlying internally made church law is conceived by both churches to be divine law. While for the Roman Catholic Church, canon law is defined as internal ecclesiastical regulation, for the Church of England there is no agreed, clear understanding of the terms ‘canon law’ and ‘ecclesiastical law’.

Although the indebtedness of early modern English dramatic literature to the intellectual and literary milieu of the Inns of Court is widely recognized, its revelling culture has been heretofore understudied. The Inns of Court developed its own festive culture, which gives the evidence of the hybridity of courtly entertainments and satirical urbanism. This article looks in detail at two Inns of Court revels performed in the 1590s, Gesta Grayorum (1594–95, Gray’s Inn) and Le Prince d’Amour (1597–98, Middle Temple), and explores the shifting nature of the Elizabethan entertainment culture.