Public and private interests

In the 1620s, the Puritan lawyer Henry Sherfield evidently felt completely comfortable in describing his relationship to God in contractual language that referred to the terms of a conditional bond between them. By the time of the outbreak of the civil wars, the occupation of land was increasingly seen largely as a commercial relationship between landlord and tenant. Thus in terms of both obligations and tenures, early modern men (and women, too) apparently exercised considerable individual agency, and this was matched by an increasing acknowledgment in public rhetoric and political thought that individuals might expect to have ‘private’ interests that were distinct from those of the ‘state’ or the community at large.

In fact, the distinction between public and private interests was implicit in some of the standard views expressed from time to time about the origins of political society itself, namely that it was the heads of households (patriarchs) who had eschewed a warlike state of nature to live under a rule of law that would protect their property and their families. Thus the early seventeenth-century judge Sir John Dodderidge on at least one occasion explained to grand jurors that commonwealths were essentially aggregations of ‘private families’. Apparently following Aristotle, he then went on to divide the law into that part which dealt with the polity in general, and that which dealt with ‘oeconomick’, or household, matters concerning the ‘private carriage of each man in his particular domain’.