Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England

Examines legal thought and practice from the later middle ages through to the middle of the seventeenth century.

Christopher W. Brooks (Author)

9780521323918, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 January 2009

470 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.9 cm, 0.87 kg

'Christopher Brooks examines Tudor and early Stuart English law both as a professional practice and a set of principles shaping national and local politics, constitutional theory, economics, landholding, and family life. He achieves striking breadth by combining the classic 'internalist' focus on legal training, institutional evolution, and litigation patterns with 'externalist' concerns about how law shaped society by allocating resources, adjudicating among competing claimants to power, and providing a grammar for conducting political and economic negotiations.' The Journal of Law and History Review

Law, like religion, provided one of the principal discourses through which early-modern English people conceptualised the world in which they lived. Transcending traditional boundaries between social, legal and political history, this innovative and authoritative study examines the development of legal thought and practice from the later middle ages through to the outbreak of the English civil war, and explores the ways in which law mediated and constituted social and economic relationships within the household, the community, and the state at all levels. By arguing that English common law was essentially the creation of the wider community, it challenges many current assumptions and opens new perspectives about how early-modern society should be understood. Its magisterial scope and lucid exposition will make it essential reading for those interested in subjects ranging from high politics and constitutional theory to the history of the family, as well as the history of law.

1. English history and the history of English law 1485–1642
2. Courts, lawyers and legal thought under the early Tudors
3. The initiatives of the crown and the break from Rome
4. Political realities and legal discourse in the later sixteenth century
5. The politics of jurisdiction I: the liberty of the subject and the ecclesiastical polity 1560–c.1610
6. The politics of jurisdiction II: multiple kingdoms and questions about royal authority
7. The absoluta potestas of a sovereign and the liberty of the subject: law and political controversy in the 1620s
8. The degeneration of civil society into a state of war 1629–1642
9. Law and 'community'
10. The aristocracy, the gentry and the rule of law
11. Economic and tenurial relationships
12. The household and its members
13. The person, the community and the state
14. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Law [L], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], British & Irish history [HBJD1]