Professor Milsom has suggested that “At any one time the law represents a substantial part of the assumptions of society” (S.F.C. Milsom, A Natural History of the Common Law (2003), p. 75). At the start of his book Professor Brooks in similar vein draws attention to a conclusion of Lawrence Rosen's work on modern Morocco: “judicial reasoning surprisingly often corresponded with everyday views within society at large” (p. 5). Professor Brooks “seeks to reintegrate the history of law, legal institutions and the legal professions with the general political and social history of the period between the end of the Middle Ages and the outbreak of the English civil wars in 1642” (p. 1), and to “combine an intimate familiarity with the institutional and intellectual world of early modern lawyers with as much local knowledge as possible of the streets and households of villages and market towns from Devon to Northumberland and from Wales to London and East Anglia”; (p. 7). A Herculean challenge given the nature and range of the evidence; but few are better qualified to meet it.

If “the law” represents a substantial part of the assumptions of society, which law and whose law? In England the common law and common lawyers come immediately to mind. The “life-signs of both the legal profession and the common law were strong rather than weak in the fifteenth century” (p. 31); in the years after 1560 “the inns of court … appear to have been places of self-confidence and intellectual vitality” (p. 62). But this was not law simply as a mechanism of power: the common law took a “circumscribed” view of elite privilege (p. 294), and “law was much more deeply ingrained into everyday life than has until recently been recognised by most historians” (p. 307). Lives were recorded in legal instruments, and “it is hard to see how early modern ‘popular culture’ can be adequately described without including this legal dimension” (p. 308). Despite the later sixteenth-century explosion of litigation in the central courts at Westminster, the “[c]ourts associated with the manor and the borough were unquestionably the jurisdictions most familiar to early modern men and women” (p. 244), though it is very difficult in the period to find “a distinctively ‘folk justice’ … which was … completely out of touch with the common law” (p. 424).

But the common law and common lawyers cannot be the end of the story: “[s]ignificant aspects of the legal history of the early modern period must … be written in terms of the relationship between a national common law … and a plurality of other jurisdictions with which it interacted” (p. 424), including the Chancery and other courts of equity, the ecclesiastical courts, and a multitude of local jurisdictions. And while the common law might be seen as intellectually insular, in that “there was relatively little direct reference to either Roman civil or canon law in connection with arguments made in court”, “the political history of the British Isles made it inevitable that English lawyers give some thought to the intersection of different legal cultures”, in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (p. 425). Other intersections also required attention – between the sexes; between parent and child; between master and servant or apprentice; between lord and tenant; between freehold and copyhold; between neighbours; and between individuals and the “state”. (chs. 11–13).

If the law represents a substantial part of the assumptions of society, should assumptions cease to be shared the law may become disputed ground. Inns of court readings going deeply into the nature of the constitution were rare in Elizabethan England (p. 81), but by the later sixteenth century “[t]hanks … to the intellectual structures of the time, as well as confessional conflict and uncertainties about the succession to the throne, political rhetoric and constitutional thought were cast in a mode of discourse that merged technical legal learning with a more general emphasis on the role and benefits of law as a defining characteristic of the state and civil society” (p. 93). The accession of James VI and I “had the potential for disagreements … about the place of the national law of England in the composite monarchy that resulted” (p. 131), and “the controversies surrounding prohibitions, the union of the kingdoms …, and impositions reveal a growing differentiation in the stock of political ideas that informed the role of law in the English polity, and disagreement about how they should be applied” (p. 142).

Such disagreement was frequently grounded in familiar legal terms. “If the king could make financial demands on his subjects, or question their titles without their consent, then he was ruling not as a lawful king but as a seigneurial one who claimed an interest … similar to that of a manorial lord over his tenants at will” (p. 348), while in contrast, “[s]ome … were attracted”, in the ship money debate, “by the idea that military tenures ensured that some landholders might also be subject-soldiers”, either “equipped to defend the realm, or … obliged to pay for it” (p. 340–41). The manor might be a “petty kingdom”, but some saw limits to this: “If the king, like lords of manors, was obliged to provide justice, neither he nor they sat regularly on the justice seat themselves” (p. 247), and, as Henry Parker put it in 1642, “the king's power and office were held in trust for [the people]”, and parliament's actions were a response to “the king's breach of trust”.

But it was inevitably “difficult to prove that the king held the crown as a trustee rather than by a hereditary right at common law” (p. 239), and the law proved unequal to the burden. Its very malleability and receptivity to change, and the underdeveloped nature of contemporary English public law, denied a clear resolution of conflicting assumptions, and “by the 1640s, if not the 1620s, the kinds of arguments that were being made about the nature of authority in the English polity could no longer be comfortably resolved in a court of law” (p. 430). In one sense the lawyers had failed, a failure epitomised in Edward Coke's vision of the chief justice of England identifying slain rebels on the field of battle in order that their property be confiscated (p. 240). But in another sense, while the effect of the civil wars may have been to drive the lawyers into increased formalism, the law's achievement was to ensure that in time of crisis Magna Carta's nullus liber homo came readily to mind, and to “provide a space for words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’” (p. 432).

There are some slips in the handling of legal technicalities (for example that original writs were issued by the “court of Chancery” (p.20), or that wardship and primer seisin were forms of feudal service (p. 326)). Specialist legal historians may wince, but will understand; others may not, which is a pity, and (perhaps for reasons of space) bibliographical reference to more detailed treatments is selective. More attention might perhaps have been given to the question of a contemporary common law shift from “doctrine” to “jurisprudence”, and to the role of contemporary common lawyers as practitioners in Chancery as much as in the courts of common law. But no early-modern historian of the British Isles, legal or otherwise, should be without this book. It is a notable achievement, over an astonishingly wide range, and will no doubt bear much fruit.