I am not a legal historian, I am not a lawyer; to address a body so eminent in those particular ways is something of an excitement, a strain, an embarrassment, a pleasure; at least I can talk history, perhaps teach history, to lawyers. Because what I would like to talk about today is not really the history of the law so much as how the changes that happened in sixteenth-century law may be seen to fit into a larger historical framework – an interpretation of the sixteenth century which takes account of the dynamics of that age and gives us some way of understanding initiatives and the proceedings that also affected the history of the law. It is a well-known fact that the sixteenth century witnessed a major transformation in the history of the common law, though it is also a well-known fact that we face here one of the ‘dark ages’, as Dr Baker has called them, in the history of that law.

In other words, we know that things were transformed but we have not very much idea of what they were transformed from or into, and least of all do we yet know exactly what transformations happened in the course of that major change; nor can I give you much detail of that kind.