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. Extensive research in both London and provincial manuscript collections establishes a foundation for this synthesis.

Brooks's ambitious agenda leads him to examine early modern English law from a succession of different perspectives, each one bringing to the fore different methods and historical literatures. Humanism, neo-Stoicism, the “common law mind,” and reason of state are central to Brooks's treatment of jurisprudence. Chapters on constitutionalism use the classic progression of headline disputes (the forced loan, ship money, the Petition of Right, and writs of prohibition) to chart struggles between Crown and Parliament and between the common law and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Brooks explores how the Crown, Parliament, and national courts suppressed “overmighty subjects” and achieved a greater influence over local courts and provincial gentry. He draws on the proliferating early modern statebuilding literature to suggest the decisive importance of local elites aligning their interests with the state because they perceived its value to their political, material, or dignitary interests. The early modern state was as much invited into the counties as imposed upon them. In the fashion of the New British History, Brooks asks how the law handled the challenge of England's slow and incomplete integration of Wales as the Crown unsteadily governed Ireland and Scotland (after 1603). Social history infuses the chapters on landholding, commerce, and the family. Here Brooks contributes to debates over enclosure, the persistence of feudalism, the nature of dependency, the limits of the reformation of morals, and the alleged connection of the common law to economic liberalization. Every section returns to what is perhaps the book's leitmotif: the problem of how legal ideas circulated among London lawyers, the Crown, Parliament, local notables and the “common people.” Brooks pays particular attention to grand jury and manorial court charges, which exist in considerable numbers in scattered manuscripts.

Each of the topics explored in the book has been treated in a well-developed literature. But each has typically been pursued with scant reference to the others. Historians of family life seldom consider the ancient constitution, while students of the Petition of Right do not treat guild regulation of apprenticeship and economic production. Brooks's signal achievement is to bring all of these disparate elements together and highlight interconnections. He aims for a synoptic analysis of the many facets of early modern English law with an eye on its social and political ramifications.

Does Brooks's synthesis inadvertently make the field of early modern English legal history less distinctive? Consider some of the traditional themes of the field: Inns of Court training, reliance on lay justice overseen by a small number of traveling professional justices, the “common law mind,” the constitutional balance between Crown and Parliament in a unified polity, and the small role afforded the civil law. All of this underscored differences between England and other Western and Central European states. England was sometimes in a minority and, on occasion, unique. Brooks's synthesis brings to the foreground what England shared with her neighbors. Here are a few points among the many that could be cited. France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire, no less than James I's England, were composite monarchies and/or multiple kingdoms. Monarchs throughout Europe built states by recruiting provincial notables into legal institutions operating under Crown law but relying on local participation, which was as much bargained for as demanded. Royal justice in many areas of early modern Europe exercised closer supervision over families, poor relief, and guilds. Does English legal history look less singular as it becomes more capacious?