HIS LEGAL THOUGHT IN GENERAL

As far as Shareshull's personal interests and opinions can be inferred from the narrative of his public life, it is clear that much of his legal thinking had been expressed in practical measures—such as the formulation of statutes, and of effective means for their enforcement through novel expedients for the punishment of offenders, through the development of existing types of justices or the creation of new ones. Even without listening to him in court, I feel sure, from the evidence on his relation to labour legislation and to the maintenance of the peace of the realm, that he wished to keep labourers in their place, that he favoured a strong central government, that he meant by all possible methods to discourage corruption of officials and to check violence, whether committed by members of the upper or of the lower classes. In its outward acts his religion conformed with that of his times and included the bestowal of gifts upon, and affording protection to, monastic houses, and probably attendance, in his rare moments of leisure, at Steeple Barton church, only a short walk across the fields from his home in Barton Odonis. But his conventional appeal to God in a letter to the abbot of Glastonbury is in striking contrast to his cynical remarks in court. He had the aim, fashionable among his contemporaries, of accumulating landed property through purchase and through suitable marriages for himself and his children, and even for his widowed mother. That a lawyer, versed in common law and therefore in the habit of looking to past precedents, should normally hold many conservative views, was as natural in the fourteenth as it is in the twentieth century, and Shareshull was no exception.

Although the age of Edward III was not an age of formal jurisprudence and was singularly lacking in the composition of legal and political treatises, it was a particularly interesting transition period in England, not only for economic and social conditions, but also for the development of political and judicial institutions and concepts that were to make possible the clear-cut definitions of later centuries, the sixteenth and especially the seventeenth—definitions that included the meaning of statute, the relation of parliament to common law, or the concept of sovereignty.