Christopher W Brooks, LAW, POLITICS AND SOCIETY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org), 2008. xii + 456 pp. ISBN 9780521423918. £65.
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| DOI | 10.3366/E1364980909001218 |
| Author | Ian Williams |
| Pages | 178-180 |
Unhappy commentators observed that early-modern England had an unprecedented number of lawyers and an unprecedented number of law suits. Brooks is happier with this development, taking the pervasiveness of the law in early-modern life as the basis of an ambitious project. He argues that legal, like religious, ideas were part of general (not merely elite) public discourse and uses this starting point in an attempt to (re)integrate narrowly conceived legal history with political and social history, and to use law as a bridge between political history and social history. This book covers an impressively wide range of issues and material in pursuit of those aims.
The book falls into two overlapping halves. Chapters 2-8 consider legal ideas and their relation to politics. Chapters 9-13 discuss the place of law in, and legal ideas about, diverse social institutions ranging from personal behaviour, the household and economic relations all the way to community and “the state”. Each half is a convincing piece of scholarship, with ideas and conclusions on a wide range of issues which cannot be adequately addressed in this review.
The first half is a broadly chronological account of developments in legal thought throughout the period. The first two chapters set the scene, and it is in the subsequent chapters (on Elizabethan and Stuart thought) that Brooks comes into his own. This half provides the first thoroughly researched examination of Elizabethan legal and constitutional thought, especially significant as Brooks shows that Jacobean figures such as Edward Coke were essentially Elizabethan in their outlook (152). In 2006, Alan Cromartie observed that later sixteenth-century legal thinking was still largely unknown, with the relevant manuscripts “still very largely unstudied” (
Brooks demonstrates that Elizabethan legal thought was heavily influenced by Ciceronian and Aristotelian ideas, as lawyers praised the role of law as ensuring stability in uncertain times. As Brooks puts it, “Elizabethan technical writing on constitutional subjects integrated technical common law learning with the broader tradition of European...
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