Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution--Revisited by Christopher Hill

Author:Christopher Hill [Hill, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2008-05-21T10:11:00+00:00

From this confusion in the state of the law, Bacon tells us, followed multiplicity and length of suits; advantage to the litigious; excessive power to judges; and insecurity to property." Coke agreed that the survival from an earlier age of 'unnecessary statutes unfit for this time' created new problems in a period of rapid changes in economic practice. 'Swarms of informers' were enabled to blackmail and penalize men whose economic activities had become necessary to the community."

Above all, insecurity to property. Yet it was the law which protects our property', a Gresham professor told his City audience in 1598. 'The law of meum and luum', Ralegh agreed, marked 'the difference between subjection and slavery.'28 These definitions would have been accepted equally by Lord Burleigh, Sir John Eliot, John Pym, William Prynne, Henry Ireton, and John Lilburne. A legally protected absolute right of property was challenged only by extremists like Cowell and Roger Mainwaring-and, Pym said in 1641, by Strafford D' But James I was suspected covertly to favour Cowell: Charles and Laud made no secret of their support for Mainwaring and Strafford. Coke declared that his object in printing his Reports was 'that common good ... in quieting and establishing the possessions of many'."0 'I did not love to have a king armed with book law against me for my life and estate', Sir Roger Twysden confided to his Journal in the agonizing days of choice at the beginning of the civil wars' He referred especially to the antiquarian exploits of Noy and his like.

In the Parliaments of 1593 and 1597 law reform in the interest of brevity and certainty had been proposed. In response to this discussion, young Francis Bacon tried his hand at reform by drafting :300 legal maxims, 25 of which he presented to Elizabeth as an aperitif: These maxims were generalizations from existing statutes and cases, drawn from several different fields of law. Books, Bacon told James I, 'must follow sciences, and not sciences books'." But Bacon's maxims also aimed to state 'the general dictates of'reason which run through the different matters of law and act as its ballast'. Hence when applied hack as a criticism of existing laws they would-Bacon hoped-serve to promote consistency within and between them. So they would help to remedy the uncertainty of law, which is the principal and most just challenge that is made to the law of our nation at this time'."' As later when he came to deal with natural science, Bacon wanted to draw upon the experience of the practitioners-the lawyers-but to give coherence and predictability to their practice by devising a general theory."

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