The title of this book smacks of the nineteenth century rather than the twenty-first. Whereas the Victorians loved collections of biographical sketches which celebrated their illustrious ancestors and contemporaries, modern readers (and writers) tend to be shy of the term ‘great’ – far too elitist – especially when placed alongside ‘Christian’. For those of us who are not ecclesiastical legal historians, however, the traditional approach adopted in these excellent essays on great lives and great works is welcome, as is the notable absence of legal jargon in the book.

Mark Hill QC, who is an associate or visiting professor at universities in Cardiff, Pretoria, London and Sydney, and R H Helmholz, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, explain in the preface that this study on selected ‘legal titans in English legal history’ (p xxi) is part of Cambridge’s ambitious series of Studies in Law and Christianity. As editors they felt that the ‘span of history needed to be fully reflected, as did England’s evolution from a monolithic Christian society where religious beliefs were universally held to the rich pluralism of today’s secular world’ (p xxi). So we are presented with essays that range from Henry of Bratton (alias Bracton), born around 1200, to Lord Denning, who died in 1999 at the age of 100. These men may have inhabited different worlds, but both were masters of the common law of England and both were Christians.

Nicholas Vincent explains that the treatise called Bracton, which may have been among the property that Henry of Bratton bequeathed at his death, survives today in at least 52 medieval copies. At nearly half a million words, it is more than three times the length of the Leges Henrici Primi and Glanvill combined. Vincent argues that it ‘attempts to do for the laws of England what continental jurists had already done for both Roman and canon law’ (p 27), and that its popularity stemmed from its blend of monumentality and systematisation. In his view Bracton presents kings as ‘law-centred’ servants of the public good, while retaining ‘distinctly Christ-like qualities’ (p 135).

Vincent is followed by R H Helmholz on William Lynwood, Dean of the Court of Arches in 1417 and a keen collector of ecclesiastical benefices, who served both Church and Crown. Helmholz concludes that the importance of the Christian religion in Lynwood’s career and his commentary on the laws of the province of Canterbury is manifest. Ian Williams’ chapter on Christopher St German focuses on Doctor and Student as St German’s principal juristic writing. Here the influence of Christianity is said to be obvious and profound, St German’s principal sources for his legal theory being medieval theology, and the dialogical form of his work being about the interaction of law and religion in his thought.

St German died in 1541, 11 years before the birth of Sir Edward Coke, whose claim to greatness is put by David Chan Smith. Coke strenuously opposed ‘popery’, which he equated with tyranny and regarded as an existential threat to the state. He declared in Parliament that ‘The grounds of the common law are grounded upon the law of God’ (p 98). Here is the central thread that connects many of the jurists discussed in this book. Coke regularly sat in the congregation listening to Richard Hooker, Master of the Temple from 1585, who engaged with the Puritan Walter Travers, the afternoon lecturer. The Temple Church, which is portrayed on the book’s cover, thus offered from its pulpit ‘pure Canterbury in the morning, and Geneva in the afternoon’ (p 116). Norman Doe illustrates how, for Hooker the realist, ‘laws change and differ according to circumstances’ (p 125), and concludes that, although his impact upon political theory was ‘spectacular’ (p 136), his use as a legal authority was more muted. Anglicans regard him as ‘inventing Anglicanism’, yet modern English ecclesiastical lawyers use him little.

As Harold J Berman and John Witte Jr point out, John Selden is better known today for the famous Selden Society of legal history than for his own legal writings. Their concluding comments are worth quoting, as they encapsulate several of the themes discussed in this and other chapters:

Matthew Hale as theologian and natural law theorist is the subject of David S Sytsma’s subject, in a chapter which offers more biographical background than most others in the book and which points to aspects of Hale’s work that deserve further scholarly investigation. The interests of Hale the polymath ranged across a wide spectrum of theological and philosophical topics. Many of his theological writings remain unpublished and await the attention of scholars at Lambeth Palace Library. ‘Given the quantity and importance of Hale’s theological output’, Sytsma writes, ‘it is remarkable that the theological dimension to his treatise on natural law has received so little attention’ (p 180).

Lord Mansfield’s life spanned almost the entire eighteenth century, during which he ruled supreme as Chief Justice for 32 years. Norman S Poser suggests that Mansfield’s wish to keep his youthful Jacobite sympathies a secret may explain why he remained on the bench rather than seeking high political office. All the more intriguing, then, to read of Mansfield’s toleration of Jews, Dissenters and Roman Catholics, the last of which eventually led to the total destruction of his London house during the Gordon Riots of 1780. William Blackstone, that other giant of the eighteenth century, and the author of the famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, was also a ‘guarded man’, according to one of his admirers. Wilfrid Prest includes the following comment by James Clitherow in his account of Blackstone’s religious beliefs: ‘He was a Believer in the great Truths of Christianity from a thorough Investigation of its Evidence’ (p 214). What could be more appropriate for a lawyer, one might ask? Yet it was precisely the endless recital of the ‘evidences of Christianity’ which Samuel Taylor Coleridge was to find tiresome and finally irrelevant in subsequent decades.

Lord Mansfield was succeeded as Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench by Sir Lloyd Kenyon, who took a peerage as the first Baron Kenyon. James Oldham focuses upon what he calls Kenyon’s ‘preaching from the bench’ (p 239). A strict moralist, often blunt and irascible in manner, Kenyon said in one of his summings up, ‘I am fully impressed with the great truths of religion, which, thank God, I was taught in my early years to believe, and which the hour of reflection and inquiry, instead of producing any doubt, has fully confirmed me in’ (p 242). Stephen Lushington, described by Stephen M Waddams as ‘a civilian in the last years of Doctors’ Commons’ (p 253), legislated in the troubled years of the mid-nineteenth century, when ‘honest doubt’ surrounded new findings in biblical scholarship and scientific theory. As a Dean of Arches who had no sympathy for either wing of the Church of England, he saw his negative ruling of 1862 on the notorious collection of Essays and Reviews reversed in the Privy Council, an event described as hell dismissed with costs. Lushington mellowed in old age, however. His journey to Oxford at the age of 90, in order to vote in favour of the liberal Dean Stanley becoming a select preacher for the university, proved to be the death of him. But he was repaid by Stanley, who kindly buried him.

Charlotte Smith’s account of Roundell Palmer, Earl of Selborne, centres upon his attempts to ‘defend, to rearticulate and to reimagine the constitutional position and role of the Church of England in the high Victorian period’ (p 277). She argues that it is to Selborne as a law reformer that we owe the greatest debt. A ‘High Churchman of a very Victorian kind’, he ‘instinctively recoiled from the course taken by the ritualist heirs of the High Church revival’ (p 290). F W Maitland, on the other hand, the author of Roman Canon Law in the Church of England, was reputed to be an agnostic academic dissenter. Nevertheless, Russell Sandberg believes that it is possible to refer to him as a Christian, ‘not least because of the lack of definitional clarity concerning that term’ (p 307). Maitland was a great Christian jurist, on this argument, in the contribution that his work had in ‘developing understandings of the relationship between law and religion in a way that has stimulated later commentators and thinkers’ (p 308), including those outside the Church.

Lord Denning remained firmly inside the established Church of England. Andrew Phang points out that Denning never preached from the bench, but expressed his religious views in his extra-judicial writings. He believed that there ought always to be freedom of religion and he exhorted Christians and Jews to ‘come together in the search for truth’ (p 320). Strongly influenced by William Temple, and an avid reader of his tattered copy of the Bible, Lord Denning is the last great Christian jurist considered in a book which is timely on the brink of Brexit, and in a period in which those who describe themselves as Christians are in the minority in the United Kingdom. Great Christian Jurists exemplifies the kind of revaluation of Christian tradition in England that is current across all humanities disciplines. As such, and on its own scholarly terms, it is to be warmly welcomed.