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• Preface to the Fifth Edition
• Table of Mediaeval Cases
• Table of Modern Cases N.b. the Report References, Which Appeared In This Table In Earlier Editions, Will Be Found Incorporated In the Footnotes In the Text.
• Table of Laws and Statutes
• A Concise History of the Common Law
• Book One: a General Survey of Legal History
• Part 1: The Crown and the State
• Summary
• Chapter 1: The Anglo-saxon Period: Races and Religion
• Chapter 2: The Conquest to Henry II: The Beginnings of Administration
• Chapter 3: The Great Charters: Law Separates From Administration
• Chapter 4: Edward I to Richard II: Statutes and Social Revolution
• Chapter 5: The Fifteenth Century: the Problem of Enforcement
• Chapter 6: The Tudors: Renaissance, Reformation and Reception
• Chapter 7: The Stuarts: Struggle For the Supremacy of Law
• Chapter 8: The Eighteenth Century: Industrial Revolution
• Chapter 9: The Nineteenth Century: Liberalism and Reform
• Part 2: The Courts and the Profession
• Summary
• Chapter 1: The Communal Courts
• Chapter 2: Seignorial Jurisdiction
• Chapter 3: The Crown and Local Courts
• Chapter 4: The Jury
• Chapter 5: The Origins of the Central Courts
• Chapter 6: The Elaboration of the Judicial System: 1307-1509
• Chapter 7: The Tudors and the Common Law Courts
• Chapter 8: The Rise of the Prerogative Courts
• Chapter 9: Prerogative, Equity and Law Under the Stuarts
• Chapter 10: Parliament and the Privy Council
• Chapter 11: The Courts In the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter 12: The Legal Profession
• Chapter 13: The Growth of the Judiciary
• Chapter 14: Professional Literature
• Part 3: Some Factors In Legal History
• Summary
• Chapter 1: The Civil Law of Rome
• Chapter 2: The Canon Law of the Church
• Chapter 3: Custom
• Chapter 4: Legislation
• Chapter 5: The Principle of Precedent
• Book Two: Special Part
• Part 1: Procedure
• Summary
• Chapter 1: The Forms of Action
• Chapter 2: Civil Procedure
• Chapter 3: Pleading
• Part 2: Crime and Tort
• Summary
• Chapter 1: Criminal Procedure
• Chapter 2: The Felonies
• Chapter 3: Misdemeanours, Trespass and Tort
• Chapter 4: Liability, Civil and Criminal
• Chapter 5: Defamation
• Part 3: Real Property
• Summary
• Chapter 1: Feudalism
• Chapter 2: Feudalism In England
• Chapter 3: Inheritance and Alienability
• Chapter 4: Tenures and Incidents
• Chapter 5: The Rise of the Entail
• Chapter 6: The Common Law Estates Down to 1540
• Chapter 7: Uses and the Statute
• Chapter 8: The Later Law of Real Property
• Chapter 9: The Mortgage
• Chapter 10: Conveyances
• Part 4: Contract
• Summary
• Chapter 1: Origins
• Chapter 2: The Fourteenth Century
• Chapter 3: Assumpsit to Slade’s Case
• Chapter 4: Contract After Slade’s Case
• Chapter 5: Law Merchant and Admiralty
• Part 5: Equity
• Summary
• Chapter 1: The Early History of Equity
• Chapter 2: The Formative Period
• Chapter 3: The Work of the Chancellors
• Part 6: Succession
• Summary
• Chapter 1: Inheritance
• Chapter 2: Intestacy
• Chapter 3: Wills

CHAPTER 6

THE TUDORS: RENAISSANCE, REFORMATION AND RECEPTION

The house of Tudor came to the throne with the accession of Henry VII after the battle of Bosworth in 1485, and ruled England during one of its most brilliant periods, the sixteenth century, until the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. It was the golden age of literature, beginning with Sir Thomas More and ending with Bacon and Shakespeare; an age, too, of heroic adventure when the seamen ranged the ocean in search of new continents, and planted distant colonies whose future they could never have guessed. But besides the remote new worlds which adventurers had discovered, there was something like a new world in old Europe too. A wave of new ideas was remaking the intellectual life of Italy and France, Germany and England, and these ideas are usually grouped together by historians under the three headings of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Reception. The movement begins with the revival of classical studies, and especially of Greek. Sometimes this resulted in a sort of new paganism; instead of the frigid logic of Aristotle which had dominated the middle ages, attention turned to the genial romance of Plato, and to the poets. More occasionally the movement took a distinctly religious form, and the tragic lives of Pico, Politian and Savonarola illustrate the beauty of Christianity lived in the light of classical humanism. In England the movement is represented best by Sir Thomas More, Chancellor, historian and romantic philosopher, who combined a platonic fancy for Utopias with a steadfast devotion to traditional Catholicism which cost him his life in 1534. Erasmus also was influential in England, where he lived for some time as Professor of Greek at Cambridge. As with every great intellectual movement, the Renaissance had profound effects upon the conception of law.

THE MEDIAEVAL ACHIEVEMENT

The mediaeval man has never succeeded in ridding himself of his reputation for lawless behaviour. It is possible, no doubt, to overestimate the amount of disorder that existed, but nevertheless the fact remains that violence is a conspicuous element in almost any mediaeval chronicle. Born amid the ruins of the Roman peace, the early days of the middle ages witnessed the successive failures of several attempts to restore some semblance of authority; and this confusion was further confounded by persistent invasions. Feudalism was the compromise finally reached, and although it made wide concessions to the military idea, nevertheless in the end it accomplished the difficult task of subjecting armed force to the rule of law. Naturally progress was quicker in some places than in others, but everywhere at least a lip service was paid to the idea of law, and as the middle ages proceed it becomes more and more evident that law was winning. Religion had an important rôle in this development and contributed the valuable conception of Jehovah as a law-giver and law-enforcer—a conception derived from Judaism. Out of all the confusion and disaster of the middle ages there arose the unanimous cry for law, which should be divine in its origin, supreme in its authority, rendering justly to every man his due. Of the many intellectual systems devised in the middle ages, there was one which proved to be a practical as well as an intellectual answer to some of the most urgent of life’s problems, and that was law, law which was directly based upon the divine attribute of justice.

It might have been that the idea of law was no more than a despairing refuge in an impossible Utopia, devised by minds frightened by the evils around them. But Utopias belong to modern history; the mediaeval man was above all a man of action, and out of the night of the dark ages he began to build the fabric of law. To him the rule of law was not only a worthy achievement of the spirit, but also a great active crusade, and the greatest of all the crusades, because it alone survived its defeats.

THE RENAISSANCE AND THE STATE

Such is the subject matter of legal history in the middle ages where we can follow the rise and progress of law and the rule of law. When we come to Machiavelli we reach the spirit of the Renaissance, and begin to find law itself questioned, for his distinction between public and private morality is essentially the same heresy as to divide the substance of the Godhead; a double standard introduces a sort of polytheism utterly repugnant to mediaeval thought. And true enough, there soon came the State, as a sort of anti-Christ, to wage war with the idea of law. The issue of this conflict is perhaps still uncertain, but mediaeval thought is to-day fighting hard for the cause of law against the amoral, irresponsible State. It was mediaevalists in England, armed with Bracton and the Year Books, who ended Stuart statecraft, and the Constitution of the United States was written by men who had Magna Carta and Coke upon Littleton before their eyes. Could anything be more mediaeval than the idea of due process, or the insertion in an instrument of government of a contract clause? Pacta sunt servanda,1 it seems to say, with the real mediaeval accent. It was Machiavelli himself who gave us the word “state” and filled it with the content which we now associate with it.2 Instead of the mediaeval dominion based upon divine right and subject to law, we have the modern State based upon force and independent of morality. And so, where many a mediaeval thinker would ultimately identify law with the will of God, in modern times it will be regarded as the will of the State.

THE REFORMATION

The second aspect of this intellectual revival is the Reformation. The study of Greek led scholars to examine the New Testament in the original tongue, and soon they began to interpret it in the light of private judgment instead of following traditional custom. This abandonment of custom is highly significant of the change from mediaeval to modern times. The attempt to reconstruct Christianity from the New Testament and the earliest fathers meant a denial of over a thousand years’ growth and development in Christianity, based upon custom. This denial of the validity of theological development operating through custom and slowly shifting tradition had its parallel in legal history. Custom tends to be depreciated more and more by the State, until finally the legal restrictions within which it is confined eliminate it as one of the major sources of law. In other words, the State and the central organs of government, the courts and the legislature, are becoming the sole source of law.

The quarrel of Henry VIII with the papacy was for a time purely mediaeval in its character. Many a king and noble had been involved in similar matrimonial tangles and had incurred the displeasure of the Holy See. There was even mediaeval precedent for the confiscation of monastic property and the limitation of appeals to the papal court, but the modern spirit appears when the quarrel is carried a step further, and the doctrinal basis of Catholicism is questioned. With the reign of Edward VI the Reformation is definitely accepted as a political weapon against Rome, and (after a short reaction under Mary) the early years of Elizabeth made it the permanent basis of English political and religious life.

THE REFORMATION AND THE LAW

This attack upon the foundation of the Church was bound to undermine the mediaeval State as well. Church and State had frequently quarrelled during the middle ages, but it was the very intimacy which existed between them that provoked dissension. They were not two different powers, but merely two aspects of the one divine mission of ruling the souls and bodies of men by law. Law in the theological sense, and law as the lawyer knew it, were both based upon the same foundation—the will of God as expressed through authority (whether ecclesiastical or royal), tradition and custom. To attack the authority of the Church was therefore to attack the whole mediaeval system of law. Just as the Reformers went behind traditional Christianity to the historical sources, so there was a movement to go behind traditional law and seek for its origins. A striking example of this is the growth of two schools of Roman law, the first of which was content with Roman law as it was modified by mediaeval custom, while the second insisted upon a return to the strict letter of the classical texts.

The attack upon the traditional basis of mediaeval Christianity had its counterpart in political theory. It soon became evident that as a result of the Reformation, religion was no longer to be universally admitted as the basis of civil government. The foundations of religion had been shaken, and were differently interpreted in different countries and by different thinkers. As substitutes, various theories were proposed. In a number of them “the people” were brought into the reckoning, and attempts were made to base the theory of government upon the idea that kings existed for the convenience of their subjects, instead of (as in the middle ages) both king and people working together for the glory of God. An early form of this idea is to be found in the controversies during the sixteenth century upon the question (at that time very topical) whether a bad king could be properly assassinated by his outraged subjects. Later still it was proposed that kings, that is to say, the State, and all the forces of government, including law, are based upon a contractual relationship between ruler and subject. Some were prepared to assert this as an historical fact; to others the contract was merely to be presumed from existing circumstances.

THE REFORMATION AND THE CONSTITUTION

This secularisation of law had its effects upon the constitution. In England, as in several other States, government fell into the hands of the professional administrator, and “reasons of State” placed in his hands an extremely wide, over-riding discretion. In England this took the form of the dominance of the Council under all the Tudor sovereigns, and in the rise to importance of the office of Secretary of State. As long as Queen Elizabeth lived she was generally able to maintain this novel supremacy of the administration above the old feudal legalism, which was timidly asserted from time to time by the common lawyers. Only in her very last years did she suffer an occasional reverse. In general terms the conflict between the Council and the courts, between administration and law, is the theme of sixteenth- and also of seventeenth-century history, and its origins are clearly to be traced back to the Reformation and the resulting disorganisation of mediaeval political thought. During all this period the typical common lawyer was generally on the conservative side. He still pored over mediaeval books, he practised in mediaeval courts, and was often suspected of being secretly an adherent of the old religion. There was, therefore, a tendency to look outside of the legal profession for men to fill administrative posts, and it was to the civilians that Henry VIII turned when he was founding or reorganising such administrative courts as the Privy Council, the Star Chamber, the Court of Requests, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North, the Council of Wales, and the rest.

Attendant upon the Reformation came the Church settlement. It is a striking feature of Henry VIII’s reign that he was able to use Parliament itself as a convenient machinery for effecting the complicated settlement. The results were momentous. Parliament thereby acquired the experience of carrying out measures which were in fact revolutionary. In one statute it declared that the supreme head of the Church was not the Pope, but Henry; in another it confiscated enormous quantities of property which had been held by the Church for centuries undisputed; in another even so sacred a thing as Christian doctrine was restated by Parliament in the Statute of Six Articles; soon it was to establish a prayer-book to replace the age-old formularies hitherto in use. When in later years the powers of the modern State came to be analysed, Parliament held a very large place in the scheme of things. Those who maintained the omnipotence of Parliament found their most striking illustrations in the acts which carried out the Reformation in England. Henry VIII has been well described as the “great architect of Parliament”.1

THE RECEPTION

And, finally, we come to the movement known as the Reception.2 This was a widespread tendency in various countries of Europe to receive the classical Roman law in place of the mediaeval customary law which had only been partially Romanised, if at all. The legal scholars of the day had taken anew to the study of the books of Justinian, ignoring the thousand years of history which had introduced serious modifications in adapting Roman law to current conditions. The same problem arose in England. Traditional Christianity as represented by the mediaeval Catholic Church was replaced by a system which to its adherents seemed simpler, more reasonable and more in accord with ancient history. Ought not a similar reform to be carried out in the sphere of law? Ought not the mediaeval common law which was inexpressible in any decent language, French, Latin or English, to be replaced by the pure and ancient doctrine of the Digest? This question was seriously considered. Reginald Pole, cardinal and last of the Yorkist line, who stood equally good chances of becoming King of England or Pope, had committed himself to the idea. Henry VIII was well aware of the merits of the civilians, and founded the still existing Regius Professorships at Oxford and Cambridge for the propagation of their learning. As administrators and as judges in the prerogative courts their influence was paramount. They also maintained an ancient feud with the canonists and the papacy. But against the courts of common law they stood little chance of success. The close organisation of the profession and the numerous vested interests which it contained, the strong tradition of its educational system centring in the Inns of Court, and the practical impossibility of superseding the courts by a newer system, had the result of entrenching the common lawyers within the tangles of their feudal learning, which, moreover, had become the basis of every family fortune in the land. We venture to suggest that once again the common law stood impregnable upon the foundations laid by Henry II. It was he who gave the common law its firm grip upon the land, and for the future the more elaborate the land law became and the more subtly it contrived to entangle both present and future generations in the maze of real-property law, the more impossible it became for the landed classes to contemplate any interference with the system which assured to them and their children the complicated benefits of inheritance. In Germany, France and Scotland the Reception was accomplished with varying degrees of thoroughness; but not in England. Nevertheless the common law for a time had to maintain a stubborn defence, and for the first time in its history it made a definite alliance with the members of the House of Commons, who were equally willing to accept the aid of the lawyers. In this way were laid the foundations of the coalition between the House of Commons and the common law which was to dominate English history during the seventeenth century.

The Tudor period had its own social problem. The transition from serfdom to copyhold was nearly complete, but nevertheless there was considerable economic distress, and from the later years of Queen Elizabeth proceeds a stream of legislation dealing with unemployment and the relief of paupers, while the mediaeval machinery for the fixing of wages was kept in steady operation and even enlarged. Then, too, we find English writers for the first time taking an interest in such topics as international law and in the international aspects of commercial and maritime law, of which we shall speak later.

TUDOR LEGISLATION

Finally some words must be said on the extremely important legislation of the Tudor sovereigns. The reign of Henry VIII saw an outburst of legislation which is almost comparable to that of Edward I. The great statutes which carried out the Reformation have already been mentioned, and their importance exceeds even their position as the foundation of the Church of England, for they were astonishing examples of the almost limitless powers assumed by Parliament. Besides this, a good deal of legislation was concerned with treason, illustrating the growth of the idea of the State and the inadequacy of merely mediaeval law for its protection against the new dangers which its own activities had aroused.1 Of the rest of Henry VIII’s legislation we must mention the Statute of Proclamations (1539). Although soon repealed it is nevertheless highly significant. The old view that this statute constituted a sort of Lex Regia conferring upon the Crown the power of wide legislation without the concurrence of Parliament has been abandoned.2 The growing complication of government had brought the proclamation into prominence for the first time as a useful means of supplementing statute law on points of detail, and of carrying out those processes which to-day are effected by administrative bodies with powers delegated from the legislature. The latest and best opinion is that

The statute provided that in cases of emergency the King and Council may issue proclamations which shall have the force of an act of Parliament. They were to be published in a manner prescribed by the act, and offenders against them were to be tried by a board of councillors named in the act, constituting, as it seems, a special tribunal for the enforcement of proclamations.4 This device is certainly in accord with Henry VIII’s general policy of erecting special courts for special business, instead of enlarging the jurisdiction of the old common law courts. The second section of the statute contains carefully drawn safeguards to prevent proclamations being used in an oppressive manner; the principles of the common law, existing acts of Parliament, and property rights were put beyond the reach of proclamations. Moreover, it is equally clear that the use made of these powers by Henry VIII and his Council was moderate and reasonable; there is no evidence that the King hoped by means of proclamations to establish an absolutism or to supersede the legitimate activities of Parliament. The immediate occasion for the act was the refusal of the judges to give effect to certain proclamations by which, as an emergency measure, the government had attempted to control dealings in corn at a moment of scarcity.1 There is nothing in the numerous proclamations which have come down to us which would suggest that the act was accompanied by any serious change in their contents or their numbers, nor did the repeal of the act in 1547 prevent the constant use of proclamations by Queen Elizabeth. There is much to be said for the view put forward by Sir Cecil Carr, who suggests that its principal effect was of a more subtle order. It is one of those acts which, by conferring on the Crown powers which it already possessed, made it seem that those powers were really the gift of Parliament. Under the guise of strengthening the prerogative, it therefore really weakened it when, in after years, the implications of the act were judged from a different standpoint.2 If this is so, then an interesting parallel is to be found in the unexpected results drawn from the famous Star Chamber Act of 1487.

The two other great statutes of this reign, the Statute of Uses and the Statute of Wills, must be considered more at length in discussing the history of real property.3 Here it will be sufficient to mention them and to premise that their policy was dictated by deep political causes and required a good deal of bargaining between the Crown and different classes of society. At the basis of them lies the grave movement of agrarian unrest which was to produce several insurrections under Henry VIII and Edward VI.

THE CLOSE OF THE TUDOR AGE

With the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603), and especially the second half of it, we come to a sort of uneasy peace. The Reformation is an accomplished fact; the various attacks upon the position of the Crown, whether from domestic pretenders or from foreign foes, had definitely failed; the deposition of Queen Elizabeth by papal bull and the attempt to execute it by foreign invasion had likewise failed; the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) had given to England security upon the sea, and henceforward there was to be no serious question of foreign interference with her domestic politics—at least openly. In the sphere of law there is a similar feeling of problems having been settled or at least shelved; the common law courts begin to revive; the momentous legislation of Henry VIII is being absorbed; a new generation of lawyers brings fresh life to the old system, and a sincere attempt is made to stretch the common law to the measure of the growing needs of the nation. Parliament, although less frequently summoned, was settling its sphere of activity within the enlarged boundaries which Henry VIII’s reign had assigned to it. The House of Commons was growing steadily more important; it attracted men of great ability and was establishing close contact with the administrative side of the government. It is during this period that officials, secretaries of state, and members of the Privy Council begin to appear explaining and defending their policy before the Commons and acting as a liaison between the government and the governed. Although the Tudor age at first sight seems to end upon a quiet note, nevertheless there are indications that a loyal and devoted respect for the great Queen had a great deal to do in preventing the Commons from insisting too pointedly upon matters where they differed from the Crown. The extraordinary knowledge of human nature which Queen Elizabeth possessed, together with her admitted ability and prestige, had enabled her to prevent the raising of difficult questions; upon the first signs of trouble a motherly scolding was usually effective in reducing the House of Commons to respectful silence and even apologies. In the meantime the House developed a considerable degree of control over its own procedure, and discipline over its members. The constant enlargement of “parliamentary privilege” helped a great deal in establishing a spirit of united self-consciousness in the House, and the precedents themselves stood in good stead in the succeeding troubles with the Stuarts. In short, the quiet closing days of Queen Elizabeth’s reign were in fact a period of armed peace, interrupted, it is true, by a few significant incidents, during which both Crown and Parliament were quietly strengthening themselves for a conflict which both of them seemed to apprehend. It must never be forgotten that the Tudor monarchs were wise enough and strong enough to use Parliament as an implement of their policy, but that the success of this method depended upon the monarch commanding the personal devotion of the Commons, both by reason of a policy which was at least to some degree popular, and of the certainty that the Crown really did stand for the good of the realm. When the Commons begin to doubt whether the King is more concerned for his own or the nation’s interest, then this working alliance between Crown and Parliament will cease. There is no longer any question of a feudal nobility stepping into the breach; if the Crown cannot govern to the satisfaction of the nation, then the House of Commons will be compelled to undertake the government itself. This brings us to the Stuart age.

[1]“Pacts should be kept” (motto of Edward I).

[2]For the history of the word, see Dowdall, The Word “State”, Law Quarterly Review, xxxix. 98, and Plucknett, Words, Cornell Law Quarterly, xiv. 263-273.

[1]Pollard, Evolution of Parliament (2nd edn.), 126.

[2]As to this see Maitland’s famous lecture English Law and the Renaissance (reprinted in Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, i. 168-208), and the remarks below, p. 299.

[1]See the admirable study by Andrew Amos, The Statutes of the Reformation Parliament (1859).

[2]See Tanner, Tudor Constitutional Documents, 530, and more at large, E. R. Adair, The Statute of Proclamations, English Historical Review, xxxii. 34-46, whose extreme scepticism is rather difficult to justify.

[3]Holdsworth, History of English Law, iv. 102.

[4]See below, pp. 182-183. They were to sit in the Star Chamber.

[1]See the very able discussion of this and other matters of law and politics under Henry VIII in Letters of Stephen Gardiner (ed. Muller), 391.

[2]C. T. Carr, Delegated Legislation, 52.

[3]Below, pp. 585 ff.