Edward Coke was born in the reign of Edward VI to Robert Coke, himself a lawyer of Lincoln's Inn. After a period at Trinity College, Cambridge, Edward became a student at the Inner Temple, being called to the Bar in 1578. Living in turbulent times, Coke honed his views of the law into a weapon not merely by learned disquisition, but by excavation, and irrigation. ‘Out of the old fields must spring and grow the new corne’, he was to write. His learning was prodigious, his industry untiring. As a practising barrister he kept copious notes of his own cases and those of others living and dead, a treasure trove from which he would later draw immense riches. All that he said would have the veneer of precedent and antiquity. A legal titan, he is considered to have done more than any other to create the modern notion of the rule of law. 3 One recent biographer has written, ‘what Shakespeare is to those who write in English, Sir Edward Coke has been to lawyers of the English-speaking world’. To an American judge he was ‘the oracle and ornament of the common law’. He was not, however, a nice man. He was disagreeable, irascible, arrogant, and a bully. Most notoriously he whipped his own daughter into submission when she had the temerity to demur at marrying the duke of Buckingham's brother, a match made not in heaven but to further her father's frustrated ambitions.