Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558-1600 (review)

Explaining why English common law prevailed against the canon law of the papists, F. W. Maitland exclaimed: "Medieval England had schools of national law!"—by which he meant the Inns of Court. Raffield, while not disagreeing, makes a different point. The Inns were the primary sources of legalistic and religious traditions that preserved the myth of the "ancient constitution" against which time "runneth not" (and was therefore "immemorial"). But the Inns also provided the monarchy with claims to supremacy, when the need was there. In Raffield's account, though it is unclear that he intends this result, the Inns were successful in promoting common law and parliamentary triumph, all the while placating the monarch until Charles I had his head handed to him for rank and persistent insubordination.

According to W. C. Richardson and Wilfred Prest, earlier scholars of the legal profession, the Inns were themselves ancient, originating in the mists of the thirteenth century. Raffield prefers to write of their struggle to maintain the primacy of law even with respect to claims of monarchial supremacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He chronicles what he repeatedly and alternately refers to as the Inns' quotidian and diurnal life, which he finds saturated with Shakespearean drama, ceremonies replicating the eucharist, revels of misrule in which the good always trumped the unruly, and, of course, the moots and bolts through which the rhetoric of the common law and the equity of chancery developed. He notes the presence of Elizabeth and James at such rituals, establishing a precedent for royal approval of the Inns and their activities.

Raffield's scholarship relies heavily on William Dugdale's accounts and the fabled Doctor and Student dialogues. But a student of the powerful influence of Bacon's rhetoric on the moots might have preferred more Bacon, and more Richardson and Prest as well.