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CHAPTER 6 THE TUDORS: RENAISSANCE~ REFORMATION AND RECEPTION SUMMARY The MediaetJa/ AehietJement The Renailfance and the Siale The Reformation The Reformation and the Law The Reformation and the COltstitution The Reception Tudor Legislation The Close of the Tudor Age PAGE 40 40 41 41 42 43 44 46 The house of Tudor came to the throne with the accession of Henry VII after the battle of Bosworth in 1485, and ruled England during one of its most brilliant periods, the sixteenth century, until the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. It was the golden age of literature, beginning with Sir Thomas More and ending with Bacon and Shakespeare ; an age, too, of heroic adventure when the seamen ranged the ocean in search of new continents, and planted distant colonies whose future they could never have guessed. But besides the remote new worlds which adventurers had discovered, there was something like a new world in old Europe too. A wave of new ideas was remaking the intellectual life of Italy and France, Germany and England, and these ideas are usually grouped together by historians under the three headings of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Reception. The movement begins with the revival of classical studies, and especially of Greek. Sometimes this resulted in a sort of new paganism; instead of the frigid logic of Aristotle which had dominated the middle ages, attention turned to the genial romance of Plato, and to the poets. More occasionally the movement took a distinctly religious form, and the tragic lives of Pico, Politian and Savonarola illustrate the beauty of Christianity lived in the light of classical humanism. In England the movement is represented best by Sir Thomas More, Chancellor, historian and romantic philosopher, who combined a platonic fancy for Utopias with a steadfast devotion to traditional Catholicism which cost him his life in 1534. Erasmus also was influential in England, where he lived for some time as Professor of Greek at Cambridge. As with every great intellectual movement, the Renaissance had profound effects upon the conception oflaw. P.C.L·-3 39 40 THE CROWN AND THE STATE THE MEDIAEVAL ACHffiVEMENT The mediaeval man has never succeeded in ridding himself of his reputation for lawless behaviour. It is possible, no doubt, to overestimate the amount of disorder that existed, but nevertheless the fact remains that violence is a conspicuous element in almost any mediaeval chronicle. Born amid the ruins of the Roman peace, the early days of the middle ages witnessed the successive failures of several attempts to restore some semblance of authority; and this confusion was further confounded by persistent invasions. Feudalism was the compromise finally reached, and although it made wide concessions to the military idea, nevertheless in the end it accomplished the difficult task of subjecting armed force to the rule of law. Naturally progress was quicker in some places than in others, but everywhere at least a lip service was paid to the idea of law, and as the middle ages proceed it becomes more and more evident that law was winning. Religion had an important role in this development and contributed the valuable conception of Jehovah as a law-giver and law-enforcer-a conception derived from Judaism. Out of all the confusion and disaster of the middle ages there arose the unanimous cry for law, which should be divine in its origin, supreme in its authority, rendering justly to every man his due. Of the many intellectual systems devised in the middle ages, there was one which proved to be a practical as well as an intellectual answer to some of the most urgent of life's problems, and that was law, law which was directly based upon the divine attribute of justice. It might have been that the idea oflaw was no more than a despairing refuge in an impossible Utopia, devised by minds frightened by the evils around them. But Utopias belong to modem history; the mediaeval man was above all a man of action, and out of the night of the dark ages he began to build the fabric of law. To him the rule of law was not only a worthy achievement of the spirit, but also a great active crusade, and the greatest of all the crusades, because it alone survived its defeats. THE RENAISSANCE AND THE STATE Such is the subject matter of legal history in the middle ages where we can follow the rise and progress of law and the rule of...

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