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William Lambarde, Elizabethan Law Reform, and Early Stuart Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Wilfrid Prest
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William Lambarde (1536–1601) has been much celebrated, and cited, by historians of Tudor England. Besides compiling what is generally recognized as the earliest county history (A Perambulation of Kent, completed in 1570; first published in 1576) and a pioneering edition of Anglo-Saxon laws and customs (Archaionomia, 1568), Lambarde's famous manual on the duties, powers, and responsibilities of justices of the peace (Eirenarcha, 1581) “gives an account, which is both complete and systematic, of the organization of the local government … as it stood at the end of the sixteenth century.” Although his abilities and achievements received only a modest measure of contemporary recognition, toward the end of his life Lambarde successively acquired the posts of Deputy in the Alienations Office (1589), Master in Chancery Extraordinary (1592), Master in Chancery and Deputy Keeper of the Rolls (1597), and Keeper of Records in the Tower of London (1601). He had been associated to the bench of Lincoln's Inn in 1579 (having, as the Black Book citation put it, “deserved universallie well of his comon wealth and contrie”); these promotions induced the ruling Council to make him a full bencher, “being one of Her Majesties Masters of hir Court of Chancery and of great reading, learning and experience.”

In depicting the conscientious Elizabethan J.P. as burdened by “stacks of statutes,” Lambarde coined a phrase which has indeed “burrowed its way into most historical textbooks.” Besides numerous articles, modern scholarly interest in the man and his works has generated two biographies (published in 1965 and 1973), while the point of departure for John Howes Gleason's institutional-cumprosopographical account of local government under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts was Lambarde's own record of his activities as a Kentish justice in the 1580s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , October 1995 , pp. 464 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1995

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References

1 Holdsworth, William, A History of English Law (London, 1922–1952), 4:119Google Scholar.

2 Baildon, W. P., comp., The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn: The Black Books Vol. I from A. D. 1422 to A. D. 1586 (London, 1897), 1:412Google Scholar, and The Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn: The Black Books Vol. II from A. D. 1586 to A. D. 1660 (London, 1898), p. 51Google Scholar.

3 Williams, P., The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979), p. 147Google Scholar. For a discounting of Lambarde's claim, cf. Palliser, D., The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Later Tudors, 1547–1603 (London, 1983)Google Scholar.

4 Dunkel, Wilbur, William Lambarde, Elizabethan Jurist, 1536–1601 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1965)Google Scholar; Warnicke, R. M., William Lambarde: Elizabethan Antiquary, 1536–1601 (Chichester, 1973)Google Scholar; Gleason, John Howes, The Justices of the Peace in England, 1558 to 1640: A Later “Eirenarcha” (Oxford, 1969)Google Scholar.

5 Alsop, J. D. and Stevens, W. M., “William Lambarde and the Elizabethan Polity,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History (1987), 8:235, 252, 253Google Scholar.

6 ibid., pp. 240, 252.

7 ibid., pp. 242, 249, 250, 252.

8 ibid., pp. 246–50.

9 ibid., p. 235.

10 William Lambarde and Local Government, ed. Read, C. (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), pp. 108, 112–13, 116Google Scholar; Archeion, or a Discourse upon the High Courts of Justice in England (1635), ed. McIlwain, C. H. and and Ward, P. L. (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 50–51, 96–112Google Scholar.

11 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d. 122(3).

12 See Warnicke, pls. 1–3, for reproductions of Lambarde's distinctive running italic hand. Harvard Law School LMS 5116 was acquired in 1950 from the dealer F. H. Marcham, together with LMSS 5114–5115 (for which, see n. 28 below). These items were among those listed as lot 517 in the Hodgson sale on June 19, 1924, described as “A Collection of MSS Documents and Printed Books, property of W. G. Lambarde, esq., originally owned by William Lambarde and added to by later members of the family.” Compare Baker, J. H., English Legal Manuscripts in the United States of America: Part II (London, 1990), pp. 202–3Google Scholar.

13 Alsop and Stevens note a similar wariness in William Fleetwood's disinclination to include material about “unlawful and novel practices” in a manuscript treatise on the duchy of Lancaster compiled in the early 1590s: see Alsop and Stevens, p. 241.

14 Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fol. 20.

15 ibid., fols. 20–20v.

16 ibid., fols. 20v–21.

17 Peck, L. L., Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (London, 1990), pp. 161, 271, n. 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. However, in fairness to the late Joel Hurstfield, the only author cited by Peck in this connection, it should be noted that he drew a distinction between the two realms of law and of politics, maintaining that “corruption of justice is relatively easy to identify and to define,” unlike the “far more elusive problem” of political corruption, which was his primary concern: cf. Hurstfield, J., “Political corruption in modern England: the historian's problem,” in his Freedom, Corruption and Government in Elizabethan England (London, 1973), p. 147Google Scholar.

18 R. W. Esq., Mount Tabor … Also Certain occasionall Observations (London, 1639), p. 144Google Scholar; cf. Prest, W. R., The Rise of the Barristers (Oxford, 1986), p. 306Google Scholar. The solicitation of judges was also discussed and condemned by Anthony Benn (ca. 1568–1615) in his essay “Of Judges and Justice,” Bedfordshire County Record Office, L28/46, fols. 50v–52.

19 Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fols. 20v–21.

20 ibid., fols. 21v–22.

21 ibid., fols. 22–22v.

22 Compare Prest, , Rise of the Barristers, pp. 28–30Google Scholar.

23 Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fols. 22v–23.

24 Ibid, fol. 23.

25 Literally, “Let the Jew Apella believe it, I don't”: cf. Horace, Satires, bk. i, satire 5, line 100.

26 Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fols. 24–25.

27 See n. 19 above.

28 Harvard Law School, LMS 5114, endorsed “Against Favourites at the Barre” and headed “Some of the Evols, that does accompanie, or followe, the Selecting of Favourites, for hearing at the Barre,” fols. 7–8, nine numbered paragraphs; and Harvard Law School, LMS 5115, headed “Against the Selecting of Favourites, at the Judiciall Barres,” fols. 17–18, eight numbered paragraphs, with a final note “See the Latter Copie.” The physical format of LMS 5115 suggests that it at one time preceded LMS 5116 in a bound volume.

29 Elton, G. R., “The Rule of Law in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Tudor Men and Institutions: Studies in English Law and Government, ed. Slavin, A. J. (Baton Rouge, La., 1972), pp. 265–94Google Scholar. Compare Baker, J. H., The Reports of Sir John Spelman, 2 vols., Selden Society, vols. 93 and 94 (1976–1977), 2:137–42Google Scholar.

30 Compare John Kenyon's review of Court Patronage and Corruption, by Peck, L. L., Journal of Modern History 65, no. 2 (1993): 389–91Google Scholar.

31 ibid., p. 390.

32 Peck (n. 17 above), pp. 198–99, has a brief discussion of these two works (STC 15332 and Wing L 86) which, like Prest, , Rise of the Barristers (n. 18 above), pp. 27–28Google Scholar, n. 50, does not identify Lambarde as their author. While differences between the published texts and the Harvard manuscript are few and minor, the printed versions do contain single words and phrases not found in the manuscript (such as the Latin tag printed as a marginal annotation on the first page of text in 1631, and at the end of the first paragraph, following the words “to meddle therein,” in 1642). So type was probably not set directly from the manuscript discussed above, but from one or more close variants. Comparison of the printed texts also indicates that the slight differences between them arose from something more than compositors' slips in copying the earlier version, since the 1642 text contains some passages which appear in the Harvard manuscript but not in the first printed edition (e.g., the sentence beginning “The Judge himselfe” on p. 11; cf. Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fol. 23).

33 The iust Lawyer His Conscionable Complaint against Auricular or private Informing and soliciting of Judges … As also, An Appendix with obiections against Favourites at the bane of Justice (1631), sigs. A2v–A3.

34 Compare Prest, , Rise of the Barristers, p. 265Google Scholar. The sole formal monopoly of pleading in the Westminster common-law courts was that enjoyed by serjeants-at-law in Common Pleas.

35 The only two unambiguous instances I have noted are the comment that legal ambidextry is a disorder of which “these last yeares have afoarded too too many and most shamefull examples” (Harvard Law School, LMS 5114, fol. 7) and a passing allusion to “theis last and woorst dayes” (Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fol. 23v).

36 Compare Alsop and Stevens (n. 5 above), p. 251.

37 Compare Veall, Donald, The Popular Movement for Law Reform, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 98, 111–20Google Scholar; Cotterell, M., “Interregnum Law Reform: The Hale Commission of 1652,” English Historical Review 83 (1968): 689–704CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Pace the powerful arguments of Condren, C., “Radicals, Conservatives and Moderates in Early Modern Political Thought: A Case of the Sandwich Island Syndrome,” History of Political Thought 10, no. 3 (1989): 525–42Google Scholar, I am not persuaded that such terms as “radical” are wholly inappropriate in this context. While Lambarde's constitutional writings may suggest that he was “indifferent to the civil law,” the Harvard MS cites with approval “F. H. (i.e. François Hotman) ad legem Juliam de ambitu” (the Julian law against bribery, passed by the comitia under Augustus): see Alsop and Stevens, p. 251; Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fol. 21. I am most grateful to Dr. Bray for his help on this point.

39 On January 20, 1588, Lambarde wrote to Ralph Rokeby, Master of Requests, commending the cause of the bearers of his letter, which begins, “Albeit I have ever more forborne to sollicite you in causes iudicially depending in yor Court, least I might iustly seeme to abuse that favour which you have long borne me to private purposes, a thing I have oftentymes condemned wth many woordes in yor owne hearing”: Folger Shakespeare Library, MS X.d. 121(2).

40 On the historiographical shifts of the past two decades, cf. Richardson, R. C., The English Revolution Revisited (London, 1988), pp. 169–72Google Scholar, and chaps. 7–11 passim; Hughes, A., The Causes of the English Civil War (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Russell, C., The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar; Brenner, R., Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London's Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, N.J., 1993), pp. 638–46Google Scholar.

41 Guy, J., Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 378, 396–97Google Scholar. Compare Neale, J. E., “The Elizabethan Political Scene,” in his The Age of Catherine de Medici and Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1963), pp. 160–70Google Scholar.

42 Compare Brooks, C. W., Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The “Lower Branch” of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), chaps. 4–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Compare Hawarde, J., Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 1593–1609, ed. Baildon, W. P. (privately printed, 1894), pp. 32, 44, 55, 63, 70, 80, 82, 122, 160, 258, 263, 342Google Scholar. See also Prest, , Rise of the Barristers (n. 18 above), pp. 281–91Google Scholar. As Brooks has pointed out, although the judges attempted “to maintain guidelines for professional conduct” by attorneys, “there were problems enough within the legal system to put plenty of flesh upon the skeleton of prejudice against lawyers,” and efforts to tackle these problems were generally far from effective: see Brooks, pp. 138–39.

44 The classic debunking is Ives, E. W., “The Reputation of the Common Lawyer in English Society, 1450–1550,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal (1960): 130–61Google Scholar.

45 On the centrality of law reform as a political and social issue during the 1640s and 1650s, cf. Prall, Stuart, The Agitation for Law Reform during the Puritan Revolution (The Hague, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hill, C., The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972), chap. 12Google Scholar.

46 Shapiro, B., “Law Reform in Seventeenth-Century England,” American Journal of Legal History 19 (1975): 280–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For two partial exceptions, cf. Greaves, R. L., Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis, 1981), pp. 669–74Google Scholar; and Brooks, pp. 138–50.

47 Elton, G. R., English Law Reform in the Sixteenth Century: Reform in an Age of Change, Selden Society (London, 1979)Google Scholar.

48 Guy, p. 397; Palliser, n. 3 above.

49 The careful handwriting and layout of Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, suggests that it was not intended solely for the author's personal use, although there is no hint that it was intended for any particular patron (such as Thomas Egerton, the later Lord Keeper, Lambarde's younger contemporary at Lincoln's Inn).

50 Harvard Law School, LMS 5116, fol. 23.

51 Compare Prest, W., “Judicial Corruption in Early Modern England,” Past and Present, no. 133 (1991), pp. 80–81Google Scholar; Alsop and Stevens (n. 5 above), pp. 252–53.