Law In Early Modern England Research Articles

Volume 51 (2021)

Volume 51 (2021)

Stephanie Elsky. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature

This is a fascinating book on an immensely important topic for our understanding of the relationship of literature and law in early modern England: custom ‘as a source of poetic creativity and political possibility’ (p. 2). Much of the book turns on the question of how early modern literature engages the myth of the ancient constitution, or the fiction of the common law as having existed from ‘time immemorial’. The myth was used to reject any suggestion that the English common law was the product of conquest, and to assert the authority of the English over their law. The ground for this understanding is laid in Chapter 1, in a discussion of John Pocock’s The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. A quite different story might be told about early modern literature in relation to Pocock’s argument that the myth was used to obscure, perhaps even actively suppress, an understanding of the common law’s relation to the feudal. As the legal historian S. F. C. Milsom noted in his Natural History of the Common Law (2003), feudally derived customs generated legal ‘monsters’. But in its consideration of custom as a ‘rich sense of the presence of the past’ (p. 116) informing early modern literary experimentation, Elsky’s book gives us a lot to reckon with.

“The Law of thy Mother”: Contesting Inheritance in Seventeenth-Century England

AbstractFor scholars of literature and the law, early modern women’s life writing offers a rich but often overlooked opportunity to explore the lived experience of the law in early modern England. ...

СИСТЕМАТИЗАЦИЯ ПРАВА АНГЛИИ В НАЧАЛЕ XVII ВЕКА: ЗНАЧЕНИЕ ИДЕЙ ФРЭНСИСА БЭКОНА

Introduction: in the year of the 460th anniversary of the birth of Francis Bacon, an English philosopher and lawyer, statesman and court practitioner, of special relevance is research into Bacon’s contribution to the development of theoretical and organizational bases of the law reform and the technique of law systematization. In his works, Bacon put forward a set of ideas concerning rationalization of common law and novelization of statutory law in early modern England. Purpose and objectives: to identify the features of legal discourse and dogmatic opposition between legal corporations of lawyers of common and civil law; to analyze their influence on the formation of Bacon’s legal worldview; to determine his contribution to the development of the concept of the ‘reform of law’ and the doctrine of the sources of law in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence; to evaluate the content of his theoretical treatises and legislative proposals concerning the systematization of statutory and case law in early Stuart England. Methods: in the course of the study of Bacon’s development as a thinker and his career advancement, we employed methodological approaches such as dialectical, cultural, general historical, sociological, dogmatic. When analyzing Bacon’s legal ideas and doctrines, his legislative projects and theoretical writings, we applied both general scientific methods (system-structural and formallogical, inductive and deductive) and special legal methods of cognition: historical-legal, comparative- legal and formal-legal, as well as methods of legal hermeneutics, interpretation, and juris linguistics. Results: we have formulated the definitions of the ‘reform of law’ and ‘systematization of law’ in the context of the legal discourse of early Stuart England and specifically in the framework of Bacon’s teachings; studied the directions of Bacon’s activity aimed at improving the judicial procedure and evidentiary practice, at unifying the law within the Anglo- Scottish union, and also the special model of the gradual reform of English law developed by Bacon. He defined the proper legal and technical conditions for the systematization of law, the necessary elements of legalistics, and the ‘general part’ in the form of a list of legal maxims andregulis juris provided in his translation. Conclusions: according to Bacon, ‘schematism’ of reforming the law involved several successive stages. We have established the following scheme of legal systematization as the ultimate goal of the legal reform according to Bacon’s plan: review and revision of statutory law – chronological incorporation of statutes and precedents – thematic hybrid codification (or consolidation) – creation of a ‘digest’ (corpus of laws) as a final document.

‘Love ye therefore the strangers’: immigration and the criminal law in early modern England

ABSTRACTThis article offers a comprehensive examination of the relationship between foreign residents and the criminal law in early modern England, as well as an investigation of trials ‘de medietate lingue’, trials with half-English and half-foreign juries, in theory and practice. Because England witnessed both a series of foreign migrations and a series of geo-political crises in the years between 1674 and 1750, the article charts patterns of foreign prosecutions across the period in order to place them in their proper historical context. The article concludes that the protections offered by English law to foreign residents were real and significant and that these protections were especially important at points of geo-political stress.

‘Saide Monstrous Hose’: Compliance, Transgression and English Sumptuary Law to 1533

Sumptuary law in early modern England has been described as unenforced, subject to systematic non-compliance, and ultimately legally inconsequential. A return to the original texts of the Acts to examine the language and form of the legal preambles suggests that another explanation might be available. Studies of surviving artefacts and information from wills and inventories suggest that the trend among the populace was toward compliance, rather than unprosecuted violation. Through to the mid-sixteenth century, when petition-driven statutes were replaced by royal proclamation, the Acts were continually refined and made more precise, closing legal loopholes that were being exploited. Records of ownership, in the form of wills and probate inventories, show minimal signs of violation of the sumptuary laws, although more do appear the higher one looks in the ranks of the nobility. When the sumptuary laws were violated, some prosecutions and fines were levied, and records from the Star Chamber, Chancery Court and Hall’s Chronicle all detail instances of punishment for violators. While the small numbers and limited descriptions in wills and inventories make it problematic to frame too sweeping a statement regarding the ownership of offending items, the combination of signs of enforcement, material evidence matching the legal requirements and the boilerplate nature of the wording of the petitions and statutes give new reason to re-evaluate our understanding of sumptuary law in England.

Christopher W. Brooks, 1948–2014: A tribute

Christopher Brooks was a member of the Board of Editors for The Seventeenth Cen tuiy since 1987. Born in Salisbury, Maryland, in December 1948, and educated at McDonogh School, Chris initially contemplated a career in journalism before becoming hooked seventeenth-century English history. Chris spent most of his academic career as a member of the History Department at Durham University: appointed in 1980; promoted to Reader in 1997 and Professor in 2001. Chris was due to retire in October 2014 at the age of 65 and was planning to continue to write for perhaps another decade in the Florida sunshine. Denied the full benefit of what seventeenth-century folk called a green old age, his life was cut short by a heart attack in August 2014. Damn those Gitanes cigarettes! He is survived by his wife Sharyn, who supported him throughout his career in a loving marriage that lasted 45 years to the day.Chris will be remembered as a true scholar, who dedicated his life and an impressive to the study of society, politics and the law in early modern England. Chris was in the process of completing a volume the tumultuous period 1625-1689 for the Oxford History of the Laws of England, having received a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to complete this monumental work. Characteristically, Chris was eager to finish this beast of a book, so as to get with other projects. Chris had long been mulling over the law mind and was poised to make a significant contribution to the place of the English legal tradition in intellectual history. He was also keen to join me in a planned project the legal aspects of inheritance, focusing the executorship process and the social consequences of wealth dispersal through probate. We had planned to write a book inheritance together in a few years' time. And he never stopped thinking about the causes and course of the English Civil War, in which the law-abiding society he studied so carefully tore itself apart while disputing the place of high authority.Chris was first turned on to the study of early modern England while an undergraduate at Princeton, where he was taught by Lawrence Stone among other members of that distinguished Faculty. One of the titans of twentieth-century English historiography, Stone's influence as a teacher had an abiding effect Chris. Though Stone later chided Chris for taking too lawyerly an approach, and Chris was the most careful of scholars, he remained surprisingly committed to some of Stone's larger hypotheses. Chris admired Stone's boldness, and believed he had reached deep insights into the nature of English society between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centimes, especially in relation to the history of the family, which revisionist criticism could not entirely disprove.Chris left Princeton in 1970 for an MA at Johns Hopkins, with Wilf Prest his first PhD supervisor, and where he hoped to be taught by the figure many would regard as the most impressive English-speaking historian of the era, J. G. A. Pocock. Before Pocock arrived to replace Prest (who was departing for Australia), however, Prest managed to persuade Chris to transfer to Oxford, where he would have limited funding but abundant access to the manuscript sources necessary for his doctoral project the English common law and society. His Oxford D.Phil was awarded in 1978, having been supervised by J. P. Cooper of Balliol, whose exacting approach to documentation left as deep a mark Chris's approach as Stone's ideas. Cooper died of a heart attack while driving to meet Chris to discuss the final revisions to the thesis; crashing his car with the annotated manuscript the passenger seat. In a rare display of superstition, Chris was always a bit twitchy when his own PhD students submitted their theses and underwent their viva. At Oxford, Chris held a Junior Research Fellowship at Brasenose from 1976 to 1980 and a college lectureship at Wadham. During his Oxford days, he encountered and formed friendships with Andrew Foster, Kenneth Fincham, Anne Laurence, Kevin Sharpe, George Bernard, Martin Ingram and Simon Schama, among many others. …

Moral panics, the media and the law in early modern England. Edited by David Lemmings and Claire Walker. Pp. xi+279 incl. 6 ills. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. £55. 978 0 230 52732 4

Moral panics, the media and the law in early modern England. Edited by David Lemmings and Claire Walker. Pp. xi+279 incl. 6 ills. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. £55. 978 0 230 52732 4

Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, ed. David Lemmings and Claire Walker

Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, ed. David Lemmings and Claire Walker

Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England - Edited by David Lemmings and Claire Walker

Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England - Edited by David Lemmings and Claire Walker

Ways of Reading

This review essay examines two recent books in the law and literature field as a way to explore important questions about the practice of law and literature itself. Discussing Shakespeare and the Law, edited by Paul Raffield and Gary Watt, and Paul Raffield’s Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England, the essay poses methodological questions such as: Do we read cultural texts of the past in search of lessons to guide our actions in our world today? Do we read characters in texts as “real” people, or as themselves text? To what extent do we take the text at its word for what it is saying? The author also raises questions relevant to cultural history, such as how to analyze agency in the process of cultural change, and how to account for the complexities and contradictions of a cultural moment.

Seeking connections between kinship and the law in early modern England

ABSTRACTThis article observes the ways in which the law mediated kinship relations in early modern England in three contexts: inheritance, marital property law, and provisions for the financially distressed. An enquiry into statutory law adopted during the period indicates that Parliament was not active in legislating in the area of family law. The courts, however, were actively involved in determining the validity of property settlements, thereby setting their temporal bounds. Both the jurisprudence and the settlements themselves illustrate that families became more interested in providing maintenance within the nuclear family (for children and widows) than they were in fostering patrilineal continuity. Likewise, an obligation to support financially needy kin was required from only a relatively small universe of family members.

To Bring Down the Flowers: The Cultural Context of Abortion Law in Early Modern England

This article takes issue with claims made by Joseph Dellapenna in his 2006 book, Dispelling the Myths of Abortion History, which claims to correct the distortions of the history of abortion law underlying Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). Dellapenna argues that, contrary to Justice Blackmun's historic analysis in Roe, abortion was considered a serious crime throughout most of European history and that courts did...punish abortions before quickening during the Middle Ages. This article shows that Dellapenna's argument relies on serious misreading of cases and ignorance of the relevant historical, medical and cultural context, and that pre-quickening or intra-marital self induced abortion was of little concern to the law.

Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558 – 1600

Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558 – 1600

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England

Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England

Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660

Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660

Book Review: Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, by Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson and A. R. Buck (eds)

Book Review: Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law in Early Modern England, by Nancy E. Wright, Margaret W. Ferguson and A. R. Buck (eds)

:Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660.(Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.)

:Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660.<i>(Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.)</i>

Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1660

Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660 Get access Raffield Paul, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ix, 289 pp. $80.00. Ken Macmillan Ken Macmillan University of Calgary Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar American Journal of Legal History, Volume 47, Issue 1, January 2005, Pages 111–113, https://doi.org/10.2307/30039498 Published: 01 January 2005

Images and cultures of law in early modern England: justice and political power, 1558-1660

This book offers an interesting interpretation of the hidden culture of the early modern legal profession and its influence on the development of the English constitution. It locates an alternative site of political sovereignty in the legal communities at the Inns of Court in London, examining the signs of legitimacy by which they sought to validate the claim that common law represented sovereign constitutional authority. The role of symbols in the culture of English law is central to the book's analysis. Within the framework of a cultural history of the legal profession from 1558 to 1660, the book considers the social presence of the law, revealed in its various signs. It analyses how institutional existence at the Inns of Court presented the legal community as an emblematic template for the English nation-state, defending the sovereignty of the Ancient Constitution by reference to the immemorial provenance of common law.