Alan Cromartie's The Constitutionalist Revolution is a challenging, sometimes difficult, but often rewarding book. Whether or not one agrees with Cromartie's conclusions, they must be engaged, for they constitute a significant effort to connect legal thought to political thought and action. Cromartie works on legal rhetoric using the contextualizing methods pioneered for the study of political rhetoric by Quentin Skinner, in whose Ideas in Context series this book appears. Legal historians will be interested in Cromartie's readings of seldom-studied print works, such as Robert Snagg's treatise on Chancery, and in his use of the kind of manuscript legal sources opened to view by John Baker and Christopher Brooks. Others will appreciate how Cromartie brings religious argument to the analysis of legal argument, and in particular, with how he connects Richard Hooker's thinking to law. Cromartie's concentration on ecclesiology as one of the principal places where legal and political ideas interacted produces some of his most important insights.

Cromartie begins with a thoughtful reading of the jurisprudence of Sir John Fortescue in the fifteenth century, then explores the Reformation's impact on law. Along the way, he considers notions of equity as they were increasingly set against common law, which, following one sixteenth-century view, Cromartie helpfully defines as “a ‘course’ … of government procedure … stifling the growth of other courses” (38). Common law's impulse to stifle other courses inspires Cromartie's approach throughout. This comes through in his account of Christopher St. German's “grounds of the law.” St. German's ground of “general custom”—along with “maxims,” perhaps—comprised what we usually call common law. Cromartie recognizes that St. German saw how statute—the sixth and last of his grounds of law—might “change virtually the whole of common law” (77): that statute, too, might stifle other courses. But rather than set common law and statute apart, as St. German did, Cromartie generally links them. This silent figuring of common law and statute as partners shapes much of the remainder of the book as it traces a trajectory through Elizabeth's and James's reigns before arriving in 1641–42 and the “constitutionalist revolution”: “the final victory of English common law as the criterion of authority” (261).

Although subtitled “An Essay,” the book reads more as a series of essays, each more ambitious than the last. These culminate in a surprising epilogue on John Locke. Many readers will be disappointed to be left without a conclusion to such a complex book. But the epilogue provides Cromartie with the occasion to make some intriguing observations concerning Locke's ideas about adjudication and trust and his resort to notions about the divinity of reason that were articulated by none other than Hooker. The subtlety of this point is doubly intriguing given that Cromartie's trajectory leading to 1642 relies on a juxtaposition of religious “conformism,” of the sort associated with Hooker, against “conventional reformed” (“Puritan”) views (129). These spiritual commitments served, respectively, as complements to “royalist” and “legalistic” commitments in law. Thus, crown and church were “equally menaced by the aggression of the common lawyers” (3). But for every writ of prohibition one common lawyer thought should issue to exalt common law over church court process, another common lawyer argued the church's side, a reality that a “Puritan” lawyer like Nicholas Fuller experienced as vividly as anyone.

Thus, part of the difficulty with the line Cromartie draws toward 1641–42 arises from how common law is generally depicted as one monolith standing against others—the king, the church, and courts of equity or civil law—rather than as a site of contest itself. As in J. G. A. Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1987), Cromartie turns to Sir Edward Coke as common law's main exemplar. But Coke had as many foes among common lawyers as he did among chancellors and civilians. The book does little to consider the work of John Langbein on criminal process, Krista Kesselring on pardon, Michael McNair on the law of evidence, or Christopher Brooks and others on litigation and jurisdictional competition. Doing so would have enlivened Cromartie's account by showing how common law was often at war with itself and how, when it was not, it silently co-opted practices and ideas from equity and civil law. The work of these and other scholars reminds us that law often manifested its ideas more powerfully in practices than in treatises. If studying practice shows that common law was fractured and porous, it becomes difficult to see “constitutionalism”—the idea “that ordinary law defines the monarch's power” (9)—arising from a conflict between “legalistic” and “royalist,” or “conventional reformed” and “conformist,” ways of thinking. Legal-political contest was multi-polar, not Manichean.

Perhaps if Edward Hyde, not Edward Coke, was our common law exemplar, we could make better sense of how so many lawyers would decide for the king in 1641–42 while others remained behind, increasingly disturbed by all that Parliament could wreck upon the common law and the courts where common law was used. People learned in the 1640s that statute and common law were competitors as much as they were partners. Cromartie is right that the early days of the Long Parliament marked a critical moment, but it may be that common law was as much the victim as the victor of revolution. After all, 1641 saw the impeachment—even the imprisonment—of some of the justices of the common law: a vivid demonstration of how Parliament had made itself superior to judicial reason and general custom. And as Parliament destroyed Star Chamber and High Commission that summer, it showed that statute had become the principal instrument for declaring what counted as jurisdiction. Statute, not common law and its courts, was “the criterion of authority.” That marked a revolution in the constitution, if not a constitutionalist revolution.