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  3. Cambridge Studies in English Legal History

Cambridge Studies in English Legal History began publication in 1921, and now includes some fifty volumes. It has always been under the general editorship of a member of the cambridge Law Faculty - since 1987 Professor J. H. Baker - and has concentrated on lawyers' aspects of legal history, both doctrinal and institutional. Over the last thirty years the series has included studies of the Courts of Exchequer, Requests, and Delegates, the Privy Council, and County Courts, and the Assizes; the earliest royal judges; attorneys and solicitors in the early modern period; law reform under the Commonwealth and the Victorian era; the effect of the Reformation on English ecclesiastical law; and biographical studies of Lord Ellesmere, Lord Stowell, Lord Eldon and Dr Lushington. The works on substantive legal history include two important contributions to our understanding of medieval land law, one concerning the feudal framework of the common law and the other the origin and early practice of entails; essays on marriage settlements, negotiable instruments, evidence, and copyright; and a study of the legal theory of medieval common lawyers. The earlier volumes, which include some edited texts, have attained classic status and have been reprinted in facsimile by Wm M. Gaunt & Sons, Inc., of Florida.

  • General Editors: J. H. Baker, St Catharine's College, Cambridge

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36 results in Cambridge Studies in English Legal History

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The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts
  • 1590–1640
  • 2nd edition
  • Wilfrid R. Prest
  • Published online:
    15 January 2023
    Print publication:
    05 January 2023
  • The Tudor and Stuart inns of court were major centres of learning and literature, as well as professional associations of practising lawyers. This book sketches the evolution of the inns from their medieval origins and traces the dramatic impact of the societies' rapid expansion through the Elizabethan era and beyond. Prest's comprehensive study based on original sources surveys the structure and functions of the inns, outlining key aspects, from tensions between junior and senior members to the nature and effectiveness of their educational role. Its lively prose locates the inns within the cultural, political, religious, and social context of Shakespearean and pre-civil war England. This corrected and revised second edition of a classic work addresses recent scholarship on the early modern inns of court and includes a new chapter introducing the book to twenty-first-century readers.

Tying the Knot
  • Rebecca Probert
  • Published online:
    10 September 2021
    Print publication:
    23 September 2021
  • The Marriage Act 1836 established the foundations of modern marriage law, allowing couples to marry in register offices and non-Anglican places of worship for the first time. Rebecca Probert draws on an exceptionally wide range of primary sources to provide the first detailed examination of marriage legislation, social practice, and their mutual interplay, from 1836 through to the unanticipated demands of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. She analyses how and why the law has evolved, closely interrogating the parliamentary and societal debates behind legislation. She demonstrates how people have chosen to marry and how those choices have changed, and evaluates how far the law has been help or hindrance in enabling couples to marry in ways that reflect their beliefs, be they religious or secular. In an era of individual choice and multiculturalism, Tying the Knot sign posts possible ways in which future legislators might avoid the pitfalls of the past.

Maintenance in Medieval England
  • Jonathan Rose
  • Published online:
    08 June 2017
    Print publication:
    22 June 2017
  • This is the first book covering those who abused and misused the legal system in medieval England and the initial attempts of the Anglo-American legal system to deal with these forms of legal corruption. Maintenance, in the sense of intermeddling in another person's litigation, was a source of repeated complaint in medieval England. This book reveals for the first time what actually transpired in the resultant litigation. Extensive study of the primary sources shows that the statutes prohibiting maintenance did not achieve their objectives because legal proceedings were rarely brought against those targeted by the statutes: the great and the powerful. Illegal maintenance was less extensive than frequently asserted because medieval judges recognized a number of valid justifications for intermeddling in litigation. Further, the book casts doubt on the effectiveness of the statutory regulation of livery. This is a treasure trove for legal historians, literature scholars, lawyers, and academic libraries.

The Reinvention of Magna Carta 1216–1616
  • John Baker
  • Published online:
    09 February 2017
    Print publication:
    26 January 2017
  • This new account of the influence of Magna Carta on the development of English public law is based largely on unpublished manuscripts. The story was discontinuous. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the charter was practically a spent force. Late-medieval law lectures gave no hint of its later importance, and even in the 1550s a commentary on Magna Carta by William Fleetwood was still cast in the late-medieval mould. Constitutional issues rarely surfaced in the courts. But a new impetus was given to chapter 29 in 1581 by the 'Puritan' barrister Robert Snagge, and by the speeches and tracts of his colleagues, and by 1587 it was being exploited by lawyers in a variety of contexts. Edward Coke seized on the new learning at once. He made extensive claims for chapter 29 while at the bar, linking it with habeas corpus, and then as a judge (1606–16) he deployed it with effect in challenging encroachments on the common law. The book ends in 1616 with the lectures of Francis Ashley, summarising the new learning, and (a few weeks later) Coke's dismissal for defending too vigorously the liberty of the subject under the common law.

Insurance in Elizabethan England
  • The London Code
  • Guido Rossi
  • Published online:
    21 January 2017
    Print publication:
    15 December 2016
  • English insurance came into being almost entirely during the Elizabethan period. However, the Great Fire of 1666 consumed most of London's mercantile document, and therefore little is known about early English insurance. Using new archival material, this study provides the first in-depth analysis of early English insurance. It focuses on a crucial yet little-known text, the London Insurance Code of the early 1580s, and shows how London insurance customs were first imported from Italy, then influenced by the Dutch, and finally shaped in a systematic fashion in that Insurance Code. The London Insurance Code was in turn heavily influenced by coeval continental codes. This deep influence attests the strong links between English and European insurance, and questions the common/civil law divide on the history of commercial law.

The Law of Contract 1670–1870
  • Warren Swain
  • Published online:
    05 February 2015
    Print publication:
    12 February 2015
  • The foundations for modern contract law were laid between 1670 and 1870. Rather than advancing a purely chronological account, this examination of the development of contract law doctrine in England during that time explores key themes in order to better understand the drivers of legal change. These themes include the relationship between lawyers and merchants, the role of equity, the place of statute, and the part played by legal literature. Developments are considered in the context of the legal system of the time and through those who were involved in litigation as lawyers, judges, jurors or litigants. It concludes that the way in which contract law developed was complex. Legal change was often uneven and slow, and some of the apparent changes had deep roots in the past. Clashes between conservative and more reformist tendencies were not uncommon.

A History of Tort Law 1900–1950
  • Paul Mitchell
  • Published online:
    05 December 2014
    Print publication:
    01 January 2015
  • Many of the defining features of the modern law of tort can be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, but, until now, developments in that period have never received a dedicated historical examination. This book examines both common law and statutory innovations, paying special attention to underlying assumptions about the operation of society, the function of tort law, and the roles of those involved in legal changes. It recovers the legal and social contexts in which some landmark decisions were given (and which puts those decisions in a very different light) and draws attention to significant and suggestive cases that have fallen into neglect. It also explores the theoretical debates of the period about the nature of tort law, and reveals the fascinating patterns of influence and power at work behind statutory initiatives to reform the law.

Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws
  • Religion, Politics and Jurisprudence, 1578–1616
  • David Chan Smith
  • Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    06 November 2014
  • Throughout his early career, Sir Edward Coke joined many of his contemporaries in his concern about the uncertainty of the common law. Coke attributed this uncertainty to the ignorance and entrepreneurship of practitioners, litigants, and other users of legal power whose actions eroded confidence in the law. Working to limit their behaviours, Coke also simultaneously sought to strengthen royal authority and the Reformation settlement. Yet the tensions in his thought led him into conflict with James I, who had accepted many of the criticisms of the common law. Sir Edward Coke and the Reformation of the Laws reframes the origins of Coke's legal thought within the context of law reform and provides a new interpretation of his early career, the development of his legal thought, and the path from royalism to opposition in the turbulent decades leading up to the English civil wars.

Medieval English Conveyances
  • J. M. Kaye
  • Published online:
    29 January 2010
    Print publication:
    01 October 2009
  • This study of the documents used in medieval England for the creation and transfer of interests in real property is the first book devoted exclusively to the subject since the publication of Thomas Madox's Formulare Anglicanum in 1702. The transactions covered include grants in fee and in perpetual alms, leases for life and for years, exchanges, surrenders and releases. Analysis of each kind of transaction is partly by way of commentary on the formulae of deeds, selected from the many thousands found in published cartularies and collections, and partly by relating the deeds to the relevant law of their periods, as found in early treatises, decided cases and the Year Books. The aim is to enable readers to identify and categorise deeds accurately, to appreciate their legal effects and to note instances where the practice of conveyancers and their clients differed from what is supposed to have been the law.

Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century
  • A Reassessment
  • Rebecca Probert
  • Published online:
    10 February 2010
    Print publication:
    02 July 2009
  • This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes the idea that the 1753 Act was harsh or strictly interpreted, illustrating the courts' pragmatic approach. Finally, it establishes that only a few non-Anglicans married according to their own rites before the Act; while afterwards most - save the exempted Quakers and Jews - similarly married in church. In short, eighteenth-century couples complied with whatever the law required for a valid marriage.

The Rise and Fall of the English Ecclesiastical Courts, 1500–1860
  • R. B. Outhwaite
  • Foreword by Richard H. Helmholz
  • Published online:
    21 January 2010
    Print publication:
    18 January 2007
  • The first history of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England that covers the period up to the removal of principal subjects inherited from the Middle Ages. Probate, marriage and divorce, tithes, defamation, and disciplinary prosecutions involving the laity are all covered. All disappeared from the church's courts during the mid-nineteenth century, and were taken over by the royal courts. The book traces the steps and reasons - large and small - by which this occurred.

Legal Foundations of Tribunals in Nineteenth Century England
  • Chantal Stebbings
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    18 January 2007
  • Nineteenth-century governments faced considerable challenges from the rapid, novel and profound changes in social and economic conditions resulting from the industrial revolution. In the context of an increasingly sophisticated and complex government, from the 1830s the specialist and largely lay statutory tribunal was conceived and adopted as the principal method of both implementing the new regulatory legislation and resolving disputes. The tribunal's legal nature and procedures, and its place in the machinery of justice, were debated and refined throughout the Victorian period. In examining this process, this 2007 book explains the interaction between legal constraints, social and economic demand and political expediency that gave rise to this form of dispute resolution. It reveals the imagination and creativity of the legislators who drew on diverse legal institutions and values to create the new tribunals, and shows how the modern difficulties of legal classification were largely the result of the institution's nineteenth-century development.

Law Courts and Lawyers in the City of London 1300–1550
  • Penny Tucker
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    18 January 2007
  • Between 1300 and 1550, London's courts were the most important English lay law courts outside Westminster. They served the most active and innovative of the local jurisdictions in which custom combined with the common law to produce different legal remedies from those contemporaneously available in the central courts. More importantly for the long term, not only did London's practices affect other local courts, but they influenced the development of the national common law, and quite possibly the development of the legal profession itself. This 2007 book provides a detailed account, accessible to non-legal historians, of the administration of the law by the medieval and early modern city of London. In analysing the workings of London's laws and law courts and the careers of those who worked in them, it shows how that administration, and those involved in it, helped to shape the modern English law.

The Royal Prerogative and the Learning of the Inns of Court
  • Margaret McGlynn
  • Published online:
    04 July 2009
    Print publication:
    04 September 2003
  • Between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth century Prerogativa Regis, a central text of fiscal feudalism, was introduced into the curriculum of the Inns of Court, developed, and then abandoned. This book argues that while lawyers often turned their attention to the text when political and financial issues brought it to the fore, they sought to maintain an intellectual consistency and coherence in the law. Discussions of both substance and procedure demonstrate how readers reflected the concerns of their time in the topics they chose to consider and how they drew on the learning of both their predecessors and their peers at the Inns. The first study based primarily on readings, this book threw light on legal education, early Tudor financial and administrative procedure, and the relationship between the ways that law was made, taught and used.

The Private Trustee in Victorian England
  • Chantal Stebbings
  • Published online:
    05 July 2009
    Print publication:
    20 December 2001
  • The trust was a popular device among the Victorian middle classes to preserve their private property for the benefit of their families. At the centre of this legal institution was the trustee, whose duty it was to manage the property as the original owner wished. In their task of managing the property, Victorian trustees found themselves in a society which was changing rapidly and extensively, a new commercial and dynamic society which had a profound effect on their ability to carry out their duties. This book explores the legal response to the challenges faced by trustees, and does so through the varied relationships which trustees necessarily experienced in the course of their administration. A consideration of the legal dimension to trusteeship, this book sets the trustee in his legal, social and economic context. It will be of interest to legal historians, as well as to historians of nineteenth-century Britain.

The Fee Tail and the Common Recovery in Medieval England
  • 1176–1502
  • Joseph Biancalana
  • Published online:
    28 July 2009
    Print publication:
    27 September 2001
  • Fee tails were a basic building block for family landholding from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. The classic entail was an interest in land which was inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to the lineal heirs of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins, development and use of the entail in later medieval England, and the origins and early use of a reliable legal mechanism for the destruction of individual entails, the common recovery. He untangles the complex history surrounding medieval landholding in this detailed study of the fee tail, the product of extensive research in original sources. This book includes an extensive index of over three hundred common recoveries with discussions of their transactional contexts. A major work which will interest lawyers and historians.

Aliens in Medieval Law
  • The Origins of Modern Citizenship
  • Keechang Kim
  • Published online:
    08 July 2009
    Print publication:
    07 December 2000
  • This reinterpretation of the legal status of foreigners in medieval England boldly rejects the canonical view which has for centuries dominated the imagination of historians and laymen alike. Keechang Kim proposes an understanding of the genesis of the modern legal regime and the important distinction between citizens and non-citizens. Making full use of medieval and early modern sources, Kim offers a compelling argument that the late medieval changes in legal treatment of foreigners are vital to an understanding of the shift of focus from status to the State, and that the historical foundation of the modern state system should be sought in this shift of outlook. The book contains a re-evaluation of the legal aspects of feudalism, examining, in particular, how the feudal legal arguments were transformed by the political theology of the Middle Ages to become the basis of the modern legal outlook.

A History of the County Court, 1846–1971
  • Patrick Polden
  • Published online:
    06 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 November 1999
  • This 1999 book was the first full-length account of the county court, which in contemporary English life has become the main forum for most civil disputes. It began as the 'poor man's court', largely concerned with the pursuit of working-class debtors; but, as this book shows, it has expanded far beyond its origins as an agency `for the more easy recovery of small debts' and now includes in its jurisdiction a diverse range of matters, including housing, accidents and consumer goods. Drawing on a wide range of sources, the author traces the history of the county court from its creation in 1846 through to the reconstruction of the court system in 1971. He describes its organisation and officers, from judges to bailiffs, and discusses the roles of judges, practising lawyers and lay persons. The text is an intriguing engagement with themes including access to justice.

Literary Copyright Reform in Early Victorian England
  • The Framing of the 1842 Copyright Act
  • Catherine Seville
  • Published online:
    18 July 2009
    Print publication:
    20 September 1999
  • Talfourd's first Copyright Bill was presented in 1837, and the public and Parliamentary controversy it provoked is reflected in contemporary pamphlets, correspondence, and hundreds of petitions presented to Parliament, as well as in the changing aims of the bill itself. In addition to the expected debate as to the nature of literary property and the economic effects on the publishing trade, discussion of copyright law raised broader questions; the relative values of literature and science, the importance of public education, the dangers of monopolies, and the nature of public interest. In a period of social, political and technological upheaval, these were incendiary matters. Talfourd audaciously demanded not only a considerable extension of copyright term, but also international protection. This book explores and sets in context the making of the Copyright Act 1842, using it to illuminate enduring issues and difficulties in the legal concept of intellectual property.

John Scott, Lord Eldon, 1751–1838
  • The Duty of Loyalty
  • Rose Melikan
  • Published online:
    07 August 2009
    Print publication:
    22 July 1999
  • John Scott, Lord Eldon (1751–1838) was a dominant figure in Georgian public life, and ranks among the most important Lord Chancellors in the long history of that office. This biography - the first for one hundred and fifty years - also surveys Eldon's earlier career as an MP and Law Officer. As a lawyer entering Parliament, he encountered both prejudices against 'learned gentlemen' and opportunities for advancement. Once in office he swiftly made his presence felt, drafting the Regency bill of 1788, and conducting the government's legal campaign against Republicanism. Retiring at last in 1827, Eldon spent his final years opposing political reform. Labelled by many as a relic of 'Old Toryism', Eldon's views of government, politics, and the constitution represent an important strand in Georgian political thinking, and his career illuminates the work of the major legal offices of British government.

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