Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England (review)

Although this book is hardly a page turner, it presents a cogent and learned argument in support of its premise—that "law was much more deeply ingrained into everyday life than has until recently been recognized by most historians" (307). Brooks does not explain his scheme in an explicit fashion, but the book divides into two sections, or two different approaches to the theme of the ongoing dialectic between law and socio-political change. In the first eight chapters, Brooks traces the parallel (or the more-or-less parallel) course between the traditional political history of Tudor and Stuart England—from late Henry VIII to the outbreak of the Civil War—and the many contemporary avenues of legal development and legal thinking. In the remaining five chapters, he investigates legal input and the debates among the lawyers regarding such contested and long-lived issues as land tenure, debt, and obligation; the role and power of the patriarchal family (and its relationship to women's freedom); and the grip of guilds upon economic "freedom."

In the first section, Brooks moves chronologically through such issues as royal succession and the nature of monarchy, the role of ecclesiastical courts, and—eventually—the limits of Stuart autocracy as they would be tested by the Bill of Rights, the Five Knights' case, the right of "free speech" in the House of Commons, and, most famously, the controversy about the king's right to raise ship money. Much of the discussion of these critical and contested issues rests on an extensive use of manuscript materials (spelled out in ten pages of bibliography). Brooks' ability to weave familiar materials, like the writings of Edward Coke and William Lambarde, with such lesser-known contributions as the papers of Attorney General John Banks (Bodleian manuscripts) or the Petyt manuscripts (Inner Temple, London) is a genuine tour de force. In the second section, he relies more on modern scholarship, discussing a number of topics that remain relevant for historiographical, as well as social, discourse even today.

Historians generally shy away from questions that involve knowledge of legal or economic history. This monograph may not convince readers to become as versed in the first field as the author is, but it will certainly make them aware of how much legal history has to offer to the familiar tale of political confrontation and social change. Athough they were not often invoked by name during the years under discussion, Aristotle and Cicero—along with the home-grown Magna Carta—loom over Brooks' account of the debate about liberty, property, community, etc. as lawyers came to the fore. William Perkins, the influential Elizabethan clergyman, lamented the extent to which many of the "best and brightest" men of his day were turning from the pulpit to the courtroom. Brooks follows this line of development as he explores local and manorial courts, as well as the higher and more familiar ones. He reveals how these men of law opposed each other, opposed old interests, and (in considerable part) opposed the rulers whose very existence supposedly gave them legitimacy in the eyes of the law with which they sought to re-define the role of the state and the status and "rights" of its more privileged citizens.