The rule of law and personal liberty

In the long history of the relationship between law and society in England, the later sixteenth century must be reckoned one of the most dynamic. Increases in the amount of legal business entering courts at all levels occurred on a scale that had not been seen for at least two hundred years previously. There had never before been a higher ratio of lawyers to population than had emerged by the end of the sixteenth century. It is not surprising that the first fifty years of the life of Sir Edward Coke, a Jacobean judge whose professional writings exerted an influence for at least two centuries after his death, coincided almost exactly with the period from the accession of Edward VI to the death of Elizabeth, or that his law reports reflect so much of the social and economic life of middle England.

Thanks, moreover, to the intellectual structures of the time, as well as confessional conflict and uncertainties about the succession to the throne, political rhetoric and constitutional thought were cast in a mode of discourse that merged technical legal learning with a more general emphasis on the role and benefits of law as a defining characteristic of the state and civil society. Potentially nationalistic, and capable of being given an historical dimension, this was also broadcast surprisingly deeply into the localities, often with the avowed oratorical purpose of persuading people to maintain their loyalty to government but at the same time encouraging them to participate in it.