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Law is a rule for the governing of a civil society, to give every man that which doth belong to him. Our laws are divided into three sorts: common law, which is nothing else but common custom and that which is commonly used through the whole nation; and this is founded especially upon certain principles or maxims made out of the law of God and the law of reason. 2. Statute laws, which are certain acts and constitutions of parliament that have been made in all succeeding generations, to correct, abridge and explain the common law; and all these to give right to every man, and to preserve every man from wrong. 3. The customs of particular places, which are the laws of the places. There is also the civil law, martial law, ecclesiastical law, canon law, law of nations, law merchant, a part of the law of nations, and the law of chivalry, or title of honor. And of all these laws, our law taketh some notice. My advice to men that go to law is as that to men that make war, to do it with good advice. A fee in the beginning of a suit to a learned lawyer is well bestowed; a fee then saved is ill saved, and oft times causeth the expense of many fees afterwards. The beginning is half the whole; lay the foundation sure, and expect a successful building. William Sheppard was one of the most prolific legal authors of the seventeenth century and certainly the most original. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

May it please your highness. This piece is composed for a groundwork in order to the regulation of the law, Which in truth, is the taking away of heavy burdens and the work of a general reformation; there is none that may more justly challenge a share in the dedication of it than your highness and your council, by whose care it hath been brought forth … At your and the parliament's feet therefore I do lay it down. And (knowing well your resolution to the work) I shall not need to use any quickenings to move you forward therein … It is probable that by this work you may bow the hearts of the people as one man, and unite them to you … To arise for the poor and needy, to set him at liberty from him that doth oppress him, is God's work, well becoming the gods of the earth. If we will be to the rulers that right (as laws) the things which prove grievous to the people, blessing will be upon them which help to take them away. And if there be any way for us to have our fasting and prayer at home accepted, and our works abroad prosperous, surely it will be by loosing the bands of wickedness, undoing the heavy burdens, letting the oppressed go free, and breaking every yoke. For while we speak oppression, and revolt, conceive and utter words of falsehood, the law is slacked, wrong judgment proceedeth. Judgment is turned away backward, justice standeth afar off, truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter … For to do judgment and justice is more acceptable than sacrifice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So that the law that was instituted for the quiet and defense of man is now by corruption abused to his vexation, charge and offense. I cannot say but woe and alas, that we are so miserably fallen and degenerated. And taking notice further that there is at this time upon the spirit of our present authority a deep sense of this and some other evils and pressures upon the nation; with a resolution, as far and as fast as it can, to cure them, if we ourselves do not obstruct it. And calling to mind the excellent invention of our common law (observed by an eminent judge of the nation, Coke Second Institute, fol. 311) that men should not be troubled for suits of small value in the great and remote courts of the nation, but that they might be heard and determined in the country, with small charge and little or no travel, it ordained county judicatures. I have taken the pains here in this work to contrive and make up one great precedent for common assurances by deed in a new and untrodden way and method … the main design and labor thereof to show when a conveyance is good and wherein the defects thereof do lie. In the spring of 1654 Sheppard was called from Gloucestershire to serve the newly established protectorate government at Whitehall. His primary responsibilities were to advise Cromwell on legal matters and to prepare a comprehensive program for the reform of the law. His understanding of his assignment is best described in his own words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not improbable that we are fallen into the last age of the world, foretold by our blessed Savior, wherein the love of many shall wax cold and iniquity shall abound. And among the abounding iniquities of this age the iniquity of the tongue, that little member set on fire by hell, is not the least; and among the evils of the tongue, is there any more pernicious and deadly, and yet more common and epidemical than back-biting and slander? … It is true that in former times we find actions on the case for slanderous words very rarely brought, which speaks thus much, that such words were then very rarely spoken. But in these days they are become almost as natural to men as their language and discourse. And therefore the disease, so deeply rooted and over-spreading calls for the application of the remedy which our law doth abundantly furnish us withal. For who knows not how frequent and foul the deceits of men in their trades by weights, measures and the like … are amongst us here today; and how much we suffer by it? And who knows not that these frauds are not only against the law of the nation, but against the law of God. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everyone, no matter of what rank, should do their duty and so rest assured that the fulfillment of each traditional task was part of the work of justice which rendered it a work of God. ‘Cursed is he that doth the work of God negligently.’ And what you find here, you have warrant to do; do it, and fear not, for it is written, ‘He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, to keep thee in thy ways.’ Let able and fit men be chosen to and kept in these offices. And truly (if I be not mistaken) herein lieth almost the whole work of reformation in church and commonwealth, to make and keep the officers thereof good … Had our bishops and officers about them been chosen out of the best men of the time, doubtless Episcopacy had not been so grievous and odious; and exchange it for Presbytery, and let the Presbyters be ambitious, covetous and contentious, and may not this model be more grievous and odious? The like may be said of the Independent model … [but] ‘when the righteous are in authority the people rejoice’ (Proverbs 29.2) … Let our justices of the peace then be curiously chosen out of the fittest of men. The first ten of Sheppard's twenty-seven books were published in the troubled times between 1641 and 1654 when the nation was learning to cope with the dislocations of the civil war and the uncertainties of the commonwealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps no finer example of the paradoxical nature of the politics of household drama can be found than the career of John Heywood. The most consistently courtly of Tudor dramatists, Heywood was also in many ways a thoroughly ‘oppositiona’ playwright, profoundly out of sympathy with the religious reforms of the 1530s and 1540s. Indeed, he came perilously close to dying for his beliefs in 1543, when he was condemned for denying the Royal Supremacy in the aftermath of the Prebendaries Plot. Yet his opposition to royal policy took place, in all but the latter instance, at court and in the royal household where he found employment throughout both the Reformation period and the Marian reaction. And his dissent was expressed, not in factional in fighting or secret conspiracy, but in the more public forum created by the production of courtly drama and the circulation of literary manuscripts. Through these means he made articulate appeals for the continuation of the old order aimed at the courtly community and, in the late 1520s and 1530s, chiefly at Henry VIII himself. Only after the return to protestantism under Elizabeth was he prompted to enter self-imposed exile in 1564, and only then after he had provided at least one dramatic entertainment for the new queen. THE PLAYWRIGHT Heywood was born around 1497, perhaps, as his most recent editors suggest, in Coventry, where he may have begun the association with the Rastell family, and through them with Thomas More, which was to colour his early dramatic career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women have no voyse in Parliament, They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none. All of them are understood either married or to bee married and their desires [are] subject to their husband. I know no remedy though some women can shift it well enough. In The Patriarch's Wife, Margaret Ezell posed the rhetorical question: ‘was seventeenth-century England a society of submissive, deferential, opinionless females whose quietude was ensured by their ignorance and a hostile legal system?’ If we broaden her question to include the sixteenth century, the answer is clearly no. As countless examples in the foregoing chapters confirm, the central courts at Westminster regularly processed cases involving knowledgeable women who were neither submissive nor deferential. The legal system was certainly hostile in the sense that crown, judiciary and parliament each accorded women fewer rights than men, but these bodies never denied women rights altogether, and female litigants went to court in their thousands. Women's relationship with the law was far from ideal, but it was not as uniformly bleak as some commentators have assumed. A variety of separate courts operated side by side in England, applying principles of equity or administering common law, ecclesiastical law or custom. Even the most male-centred of these jurisdictions provided women with distinctive rights and assistance, as well as burdening them with distinctive obligations and restrictions on their freedoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

You [Mr Bumble] are the more guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.' ‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass – a idiot. If that's the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor. (Charles Dickens Oliver Twist (1838)) Elizabethan moralists encouraged unmarried women and widows to seek legal assistance from male kin or confidants, but the common law demanded that married women leave their legal affairs to their husbands. As described in chapter 2 above, the doctrine of coverture stripped married women of their legal entities and independence. It did not, however, remove all of their rights or all of their obligations. Moreover, while coverture theoretically barred married women from appearing in court alone, it did not bar them altogether, and the single largest grouping of women who involved themselves in Requests actions were married women appearing with their husbands. A far smaller, but more intriguing, group of women were the select band of wives who defied the rules and succeeded in suing their own husbands. Their experiences provide further evidence that the Masters recognised that women's particular legal status could sometimes require particular legal and equitable attention and assistance. However, before turning to examine married women as a class of litigant it is necessary to gain a fuller understanding of the theory and practical application of the doctrine of coverture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We still understand only imperfectly the tenacity and force of local custom Scrutiny of the records of the Court of Requests has so far shed light on women's relationship with equity, with the common law and, if we include the scattering of separation and maintenance cases, with ecclesiastical law. It has become apparent that women suffered the ill effects of discriminatory rules in all of these systems, but that canny individuals who were aware of their rights, and who had access to the jurisdictions that best suited their needs, could and did use the law to advantage. Now it is the turn of custom. The Masters heard a considerable number of customary actions, brought by litigants from manors all over England. These plaintiffs used Requests as a court of appeal, arguing that they could not receive a fair hearing in their manor court, due to the power and influence of their opponents or the bias of the steward, the lord or the lady of the manor. And, as we shall see, many of these litigants were women. Lacking knowledge of every local custom, the Masters usually appointed commissioners to decide matters on their behalf, or else to equip them with the means to settle these deeply local conflicts from within the White Hall in London. The surviving interrogatories, depositions, copies of documents and commission reports, along with case materials and the written decisions and orders of the court, provide a unique source for investigating customary disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All offyces belongynge to the common weak be forbydden [women] by the lawes. … It is not permitted to a woman, though she be very wise and prudent, to pleade a cause before a Juge, furthermore they be repelled in jurisdiction, in arbiterment, in adoption, in intercession, in procuration, or to be gardeyns or tutours in causes testamentary and criminall. The past hundred years have witnessed a see-sawing of historians' perceptions of the legal status of women in early modern England. To Frederick Pollock and F.W. Maitland, writing in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the position was clear. By the time of Edward I, ‘a sure instinct has already guided the law to a general rule which will endure until our own time. As regards private rights women are on the same level as men, though postponed in the canons of inheritance; but public functions they have none.’ Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Alice Clark and other historians in the vanguard of feminist history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries agreed that women enjoyed a degree of legal independence in England prior to the seventeenth century, under customary law at least. However, far from ‘enduring until their own time’, they suggested that the combined influences of capitalism, industrialisation, the emergence of the professions and the rise to supremacy of the common law steadily undermined any independence women had once enjoyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Angel Raphael … was both a Physitian in restoring his sight, and a sollicitour, or Maister of requests in preferring his suites, to the throne of Almighty God The Court of Requests appears to have admitted a higher proportion of female plaintiffs and defendants during the reign of Elizabeth than any other Westminster court. This chapter examines the workings of the court to discover why it was popular with women. It also considers the court's business and clientele to determine the kinds of women who went to law and the matters they litigated. And it provides necessary background for the more detailed examinations of female litigation that follow. The Court of Requests has received mixed attention from historians. Legal historians have devoted little time to the court, because of its modest stature, its failure to survive beyond the first half of the seventeenth century, and the belief that it operated in the shadow of Chancery and provided no innovation in the fields of equity or law. Social and economic historians have dipped into its archive to investigate specific causes, but as L.M. Hill recently observed, the court and its Masters have ‘been in a historiographic backwater since the sixteenth century’, despite the thousands of case files in its archives that document the legal battles of a broad cross-section of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widow Blackacre: You shall hear me, and shall be instructed. Lets see your Brief. Mr Petulant: Send your Solicitor to me, instructed by a Woman! I'd have you to know, I do not wear a Bar-gown – – Widow Blackacre: By a Woman! And I'd have you to know, I am no common Woman; but a woman conversant in the laws of the Land, as well as your self, tho' I have no Bar-gown. In the eyes of the law, single women and widows had full legal capacity. When considering women's rights it is consequently a mistake to study only those areas of the law obviously associated with women, such as jointure, dower, marriage settlements and separate estates. Such a focus can be misleading, for two reasons. First of all, it ignores the fact that in theory adult women without husbands were litigants like any others, free to go to court over the same issues as men. In practice this meant not just dower and jointure, but debts, bonds, contracts, property transactions, inheritance and a host of other matters. Secondly, for reasons connected with the legal restrictions wives suffered during marriage, women in sixteenth century England rarely played as dominant a role in litigating their own marriage settlements and separate estates as logic might suggest. They took part in marriage negotiations, but only occasionally did they participate in court actions when negotiated agreements failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONTEXT In several accounts Hobbes gives the impression that he had been composing the English version of his political theory from the middle of 1646, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that he was actually working on De Corpore between 1646 and 1649. Hobbes appears to have started work on Leviathan in late 1649, putting aside the manuscript of De Corpore, which was nearly ready for publication. Hobbes's reasons for doing this are not entirely clear, but circumstantial evidence suggests that the reason might have been both political and controversial. Quentin Skinner's original thought that the new work was a contribution to the allegiance controversy fits chronologically with the debate over the engagement and theoretically with Hobbes's sharpened emphasis in Leviathan upon the conditional quality of obedience (specifically its relationship to protection). The problem comes in characterising Hobbes's relationship to this debate, particularly because the arguments speaking most directly to the question of allegiance are to be found in the short ‘Review and Conclusion’ that Hobbes added to the end of the work. Commentators have noted tensions between the argument in the body of the text and the political message contained in the ‘Review’, and this has generated considerable debate as to the extent to which Leviathan itself was genuinely a pièce d'occasion, and a contribution to the engagement controversy. It is a testimony to the open quality of Hobbes's work that the textual evidence has been used to support almost diametrically opposed but nevertheless plausible interpretations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 13 of the book "The Woman-Hater" is presented. It emphasizes that in Great Britain, the right of women to medicine was in a certain condition. It suggests that the study and practice of medicine and the sale of drugs is called the common law in the country, which is deeply respected. It adds that whatever liberty it allows to men or women is held sacred in the all courts until withdrawn by some act of the Legislature.

Irish political thought has scarcely had an independent history due to the thrust of academic history writing in Ireland. This discipline had dual origins: in an Irish Protestant liberal tradition dating back to W. E. H. Lecky, and in a conservative variety of English historiography cultivated in the 1930s at London, and in the 1950s at Cambridge. Thus influenced, historians have had two principal concerns: to achieve a mean between denominational competition for the ownership of Ireland's past, and to understand the intersections between the histories of Ireland and Britain. In this light, the history of political thought has, until recently, focused on thinkers concerned with disputes over the constitutional relationship between Ireland and England, while Ireland's relationship with the European continent, and particularly with Catholic Europe, was left to Catholic (frequently clerical) historians writing to their own agendas. These distortions have been largely remedied by a new generation of historians who have delved into an ever-expanding range of sources concerning Ireland's multifarious links with Continental Europe. This work has also alerted scholars (including literary scholars) to the importance of printed and documentary sources in the Irish and Latin languages, while English language sources have shed fresh information following their re-interrogation by historians who have read more extensively on various historical experiences than their predecessors. Practitioners of both the new British history and Atlantic history have also been situating developments in Ireland (including the formation of political ideas) in ever widening contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: PARTY AND POLARIZATION The civic elections of 1682 revealed the extent of party feeling and party organization in London. Party confrontations were a natural expression of the different hopes and fears of divergent Protestant communities. This chapter examines both the Whig and Tory discourse that dominated the public sphere of London in the Restoration Crisis and the different communities in which these opposite political and religious languages flourished. It begins with a topographic analysis of urban politics that anchors the expression of partisanship in contrasting socio-geographic spaces in the Corporation of London. Party in London in 1679–82 was a neighborhood affair, an expression of the local networks of friendship and affinity that have already been seen, especially in the civic Whigs' political petitioning and feasting. The chapter also examines how urban debate about the succession and parliament was shaped by the different discursive traditions maintained in these party-inclined spaces. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the leaderships and the electoral followings of the two parties: they were captained by contrasting political elites and favored by contrasting collections of guild electors. The different communities, ideas, leaders, and electoral followings that sustained partisanship in London all suggest that party is no misplaced historical construction in analysis of the Restoration Crisis. Historians have become wary of employing binary divisions in the analysis of early modern English political life, but a polarization of opinion nevertheless accompanied the expression of partisanship in London and the kingdom during the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE LOSS OF THE INITIATIVE The London shrieval election of 1682 had brought the king and the Whigs to the brink of a confrontation unlike anything seen in the city since 1641–2, except the standoff between the Rump and the Corporation in 1659–60. Although the government believed it had begun the political reconstruction of the Corporation with the declaration of Tory sheriffs on 28 September, the London Whigs were reconciled neither to this result nor to the process that had achieved it. Moreover, the boundary dividing legal action and maneuvre from the outright defiance of authority had begun to dissolve as Whig anger mounted through the summer months of 1682. Whig citizens had accused Lord Mayor Moore of seeking to impose his “will” upon them, contrary to law. They claimed that unjust and unlawful force had been utilized in an electoral process and that a “military government” had been established over them. They accused loyalist magistrates of violating their oaths and their “trusts” to preserve the rights of citizens. Most ominously, Sheriff Pilkington had defended the people's right to “fortify” themselves in defense of their “Lives, Religion, and Liberty.” This was not the language of political acquiescence, and the London Whigs would have been surprised to learn that their contest with the crown was over. City and Country Whigs were, nevertheless, not entirely agreed about how best to proceed in response to the “imposition” of magistrates upon the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the Middle Ages no monarch had tackled the problem of creating a trained military force for the defence of the realm with as much vigour as the young Charles I. During the war years of 1625-9 he aimed at fashioning an ‘exact’ or ‘perfect’ militia in England. Had he established a standing army or mobile regiments of trained-band soldiers, the civil wars might not have occurred. But he did not. Instead he reinvigorated tradition rather than innovated, by demanding that the trained bands fulfil their potential. However, the existence of the perfect militia did not hinder the Scots from crossing into England in 1640, nor did the trained bands flock to the royal standard in 1642. Two questions dog any inquiry into the mobilizations of 1639 and 1640. Was the English militia capable of fighting the Covenanters? Tangentially, why did the King excuse trained soldiers from the expedition by allowing the substitution clause? This chapter argues that militia service, like military charges, was determined by the political relationship between the localities and the central government. Given the political and religious controversy surrounding the Scottish mobilizations, Charles could not make unqualified demands upon the military resources of the shires, especially as regards taking the militia out of the shire. Although the auxiliary role played by the trained bands in the Bishops' Wars was a direct result of the way in which the King mobilized his forces, the liability of the militia for such campaigning had developed over the centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1639-40 Charles I twice mobilized England and Wales to suppress a Scottish rebellion against his ecclesiastical and, by implication, his temporal policies. Between these campaigns the Short Parliament of April-May 1640 was convened, bringing into sharp focus the mistrust that had festered between Charles I and those he ruled. The Bishops' Wars, so-called because they were fought to uphold episcopacy in Scotland, demolished the myth of Caroline political consensus and revealed the gulf between King and country. England's inability to crush Scotland or even to prevent the invasion of the north by the army of the Covenanters, this book argues, was essentially a political failure which demonstrated Charles's inability to manage government. It was the King's maladministration of the institutions at his disposal, rather than structural failure within the institutions themselves, which precipitated failure in a war that was entirely of the King's choosing. Charles expected institutions such as the Exchequer, the Ordnance Office, and the lieutenancy to perform at unreasonably high levels of efficiency despite shortages of personnel, precipitous decisions that gave insufficient notification to royal servants expected to perform difficult tasks, and a dearth of funding, all results of his Personal Rule. He could not fully mobilize the nation's might because his subjects did not entirely trust his motives and methods. Lacking that trust Charles could only start wars; successfully finishing them lay beyond his grasp so long as he could not harness fully the kingdom's resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]