Law Lawyers And Litigants In Early Modern England

Written in memory of Christopher W. Brooks, this collection of essays by prominent historians examines and builds on the scholarly legacy of the leading historian of early modern English law, society and politics. Brooks's work put legal culture and legal consciousness at the centre of our understanding of seventeenth and eighteenth century English society, and the English common law tradition. The essays presented here develop a number of strands found in his work, and take them in new directions. They shed new light on central debates in the history of the common law, exploring how law was understood and used by different communities in early modern England, and examining how and why people engaged (or did not engage) in litigation. The volume also contains two hitherto unpublished essays by Christopher Brooks, which consider the relationship between law and religion and between law and political revolution in seventeenth century England.

Explores the impact of legal ideas and legal consciousness on early modern English society and culture.

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.

This work charts the huge growth of the lower branches of the legal profession in sixteenth-century England..

Legal history has usually been written in terms of writs and legislation, and the development of legal doctrine. Christopher Brooks, in this series of essays roughly half of which are previously unpublished, approaches the law from two different angles: the uses made of courts and the fluctuations in the fortunes of the legal profession. Based on extensive original research, his work has helped to redefine the parameters of British legal history, away from procedural development and the refinement of legal doctrine and towards the real impact that the law had in society. He also places the law into a wider social and political context, showing how changes in the law often reflected, but at the same time influenced, changes in intellectual assumptions and political thought. Lawyers as a profession flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. This great age of lawyers was followed by a decline in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflecting both a decline in litigation and the perception of the law as slow, artificially complicated and ruinously expensive. In Lawyers, Litigation and Society, 1450-1900, Christopher Brooks also looks at the sorts of cases brought before different courts, showing why particular courts were used and for what reasons, as well as showing why the popularity of individual courts changed over the years.

First published in 1981, Lawyers in Early Modern Europe and America aims to present a convenient conspectus on the legal professions in early modern Europe, Scotland, France Spain and Colonial America, and to provide a comparative perspective on the place of the legal profession in Western societies before the Industrial Revolution. The main themes covered by each contributor are: the status, number and vocational functions of the different classes or groups or lawyers; their social origins; education and career patterns; relations between lawyers and clients, other occupations and status-groups and the state; the extent of legal ‘professionalisation’ and the role of lawyers as ‘modernisers’ in cultural, economic, political and social terms. This book will be of interest to students of history, law and political science.

Based on close readings of both public and private documents – court records, churchwarden accounts, depositions, diaries, letters and pamphlets – this collection of essays presents the largely untold story of non-elite women and their dealings with the law.

This book offers an interesting interpretation of the hidden culture of the early modern legal profession and its influence on the development of the English constitution. It locates an alternative site of political sovereignty in the legal communities at the Inns of Court in London, examining the signs of legitimacy by which they sought to validate the claim that common law represented sovereign constitutional authority. The role of symbols in the culture of English law is central to the book's analysis. Within the framework of a cultural history of the legal profession from 1558 to 1660, the book considers the social presence of the law, revealed in its various signs. It analyses how institutional existence at the Inns of Court presented the legal community as an emblematic template for the English nation-state, defending the sovereignty of the Ancient Constitution by reference to the immemorial provenance of common law.