Christopher Brooks has previously produced a number of influential studies of early modern law, most notably work on legal professionals and the dramatically rising tide of court business from the late sixteenth century. With his most recent book, Brooks examines the multifarious ways in which “the law” mediated social and political relationships, demonstrating that it served as one of the main discourses through which the early modern English understood their world. As such, he intends this work to bring the history of law (broadly defined) back into the general narratives of political and social history. Studying the period from the later Middle Ages to the outbreak of the civil wars, Brooks tackles a wide range of topics, including the legal dimensions of constitutional thought, jurisdictional conflicts in the wake of the Reformation, and the proliferation of actions for debt in the burgeoning market economy. A particular concern is the degree to which legal discourse permeated almost all levels of society. Thus, Brooks draws on not just law reports, lectures at the Inns of Court, and the archives of prominent legal figures but also town and manorial court records, the sermons and jury charges given at court sessions, and more. He suggests that “the common law was essentially the creation of the wider community” and emphasizes the law's role, not in regulation or coercion but in providing the grammar and vocabulary of an early modern “rights speak” of liberty (423).
Aspects of particular interest and value include the recurring discussion of the “social depth” of legal knowledge. Here, Brooks draws on his work on sermons, jury charges, manorial court records, and debt litigation, alongside brief forays into the history of legal publishing, to demonstrate that some features of legal discourse constituted a common intellectual currency of broad purchase. So, too, is his treatment of Tudor legal thought particularly valuable, seen here as an essential part of the story of early Stuart constitutional debates. While especially concerned with the story of dynamic legal change over the period, Brooks is careful to chart continuities from the early sixteenth century and late Middle Ages. He questions the supposed insularity of the common-law mind, demonstrating the role of continental and classical influences and of the comparisons and intersections with the legal cultures of the Welsh, Irish, and Scots. Also of interest are sections highlighting the relationship between law and religion as key discourses of the age. Both had similar functions in mediating social relationships and in enhancing and limiting royal power. Both became the subject of similar histories that depicted an early purity curtailed by foreign intervention—be it by papal agents or Norman adventurers—followed by a struggle to recover lost liberties. Of course, contemporaries also noted the unfortunate difference between the production of an English Bible, ostensibly accessible to all, and the persistence of Latin and Law French in the courts. He suggests that “it is hard to resist the conclusion that this template of historical struggle made it easier rather than harder for contemporaries to imagine the kind of conflict that emerged in the 1640s” (426). On the subject of the lead up to war, he nails no colors to the mast but seeks to revive interest in the key legal conflicts of the prewar years, which have suffered some neglect under revisionism. He questions any talk of fundamental consensus, arguing instead that the controversial cases “reveal a growing differentiation in the stock of political ideas that informed the role of law in the English polity” (142).
Brooks writes that he first began thinking about this project after reading E. P. Thompson's famous afterword in Whigs and Hunters (New York, 1975), in which Thompson recognized the “culture of the rule of law” as something more than a sham, one that did have the effect of constraining the powerful and serving interests beyond just those of the elite. As Thompson saw that culture as a product of the seventeenth-century revolutions, one might wish that Brooks had decided to extend his study into the civil war years and beyond. But as he notes, the breadth of his subject matter required some sacrifices; perhaps his upcoming volume in the Oxford History of the Laws of England, carrying through to 1688, might address this gap. Furthermore, and perhaps because he spends relatively little time on the criminal law, Brooks also spends little time evaluating the ways in which the law served different interests to differing degrees. He does, however, offer enough examples of this throughout the book—particularly in his sections on noble power and the household—for one concluding sentence to remain confusing: “It is often asserted that early modern society was characterized by patriarchal or hierarchical values, but the lack of a systematic expression of such ideas in connection with the legal life of the realm is worth reiterating and perhaps significant enough to raise questions about the assumptions that are so often made about them” (431).
Based on a remarkable range of research, consistently thoughtful, and often fascinating, the book should obtain a wide readership among early modernists. It provides a fairly comprehensive overview of legal thought and practice in the period, bringing together much that is familiar with new work and fresh conclusions in a way that makes it both a useful primer for those beginning work in the field as well as rewarding reading for those more familiar with its contours.
