Transitions in law and government generally do transpire during a ‘long century’. David Lemmings persuasively argues that the eighteenth century in England is no exception. Of course, in order to document transition, one needs to articulate a baseline for comparison: some notion of the state of affairs that existed at the commencement of the period under review; and then proceed to present a set of alterations that one perceives will document and even explain the evolution. Moreover, the transitions under consideration, those in ‘law’ and ‘government’, cover rather a wide range of the historical spectrum, so a volume of a couple of hundred pages must limit itself to themes that are of manageable proportion.

Lemmings' book presents just such an inquiry. At the onset, he signals that this is neither a book about law nor one of government, but a volume about the interplay between the two: law and government. As the Introduction proclaims, the book is about ‘Law, Consent and Government’. In an earlier era, it might be called a book about constitutional (or administrative) history. That said, the focus is decidedly ambitious, because the questions Lemmings proposes to address are variously formulated as ‘what did people expect of law’ (p. 15) and ‘who made law, who could or could not deploy it, who administered it, what formal processes applied … and what was generally apprehended by The Law’ (p. 18). In pursuit of his goals, he therefore must traverse the boundaries of political, legal, social, economic and cultural history. He does so elegantly, and while the reader may not be satisfied that all of the questions posed have been satisfactorily answered, one comes away well informed (or at the very least reminded) about transitions in the English constitution over the course of the long eighteenth century.

Setting one of the bookends for the long eighteenth century, its onset, is not problematic: 1688. The constitutional crisis of the seventeenth century seems resolved, at least for the moment, by the Glorious Revolution. What emerges, according to Lemmings, is a shared vision of the rule of law, a truce between advocates of an expansive view of the prerogative and those who saw it tempered by the power of parliament. This balance he regards as ‘the basic historical principle of the constitution’ (p. 7). Lemmings recognises that there is another player that has a claim to participation in a society governed by the rule of law: customary norms. There was an amorphous set of understandings, perhaps not explicit, of the constitution's governance of property and personal liberty. This neither rested upon prerogative nor statute, and could not be ignored. One way of making sense of the eighteenth century, long or otherwise, is to view it as an era in which neatly tailored statutes both made inroads into the power of the executive to govern unbridled, and infringed upon custom. Hence the book's subtitle: consent to command.

Having set the backdrop for change, Lemmings brings into focus sequentially the overlapping institutions that preserved the rule of law: the multi-faceted responsibilities of the justices of the peace, the prominence of civil litigation, the administration of the criminal law, and the ambitions of parliament. The interplay between institutions can best be illustrated by observing the impact of parliamentary statute on the duties of the justices of the peace. This chapter has been isolated for more detailed treatment in this review, because Lemmings devotes most attention to the administrative state, albeit from a variety of vantage points. Employing his own evidence from Cheshire during the period, as well as the work of others, he deduces a movement in matters heard before the justices of the peace, from ones that might broadly be regarded as instances of interpersonal violence to those dealing with offences against property. The explanation for the changes observed can be attributed at least in some measure to statutes enlarging the justices' ability to dispose of the latter by summary proceedings. Yet, the transition was not absolute: it is likely that a justice from the earlier period would have noticed no drastic alteration to his jurisdiction. Indeed, some of the decline in the appearance of interpersonal disputes in the record might be attributed to the architecture of the tribunals. Justices may have been hearing cases of violence individually rather than in a panel. Therefore, disputes might have escaped sessions papers. Thus Lemmings rightly notes that there was ‘change as well as continuity here’ (p. 33). Moreover, what change did occur did not create institutions that promoted core principles of the ‘rule of law’, since these unprecedented magisterial powers, often wielded by those bereft of legal acumen, eroded trial by jury. The enhanced authority of justices does provide evidence of his underlying thesis, that a decline in popular participation in government characterises the constitutional history of the long eighteenth century.

Review length limitations do not allow one to do justice even to Lemmings' treatment of the role of the justices of the peace let alone further explore his inquiries into civil litigation and criminal law administration. As promised, he has admirably illuminated ‘who made law, who could or could not deploy it, who administered it, [and] what formal processes applied’. He has also made his case for transition. There is no doubt, the beginning of the nineteenth century held very different challenges for the English constitution than it faced at the end of the seventeenth, in part due to what had transpired. It is less clear that Lemmings has delivered on his aspiration to reveal the expectations that all stripes of eighteenth-century English folk had of the law: ‘what did people expect of law’. But that task is beyond doubt daunting, and historians should hope that both Lemmings and others will someday surmount the obstacles that obtain when melding constitutional and social history.