Elite Prosopography in Elizabethan Legal History Michael Stuckey
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Prosopon: The Journal of Prosopography 1 (2006) ‘...this Society tendeth...’: Elite Prosopography in Elizabethan Legal History Michael Stuckey 1. Introduction The so-called Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries convened on a regular basis, mostly during Term times and always in London, during the fifteen-eighties and fifteen- nineties. The group’s routine meetings continued into at least the first few years of the seventeenth century, but in all likelihood these gatherings did not carry on very long into the reign of the new king, James I. Although the company never achieved any official sanction, this circle of associates included in their number many of the sharpest legal and historical intellects of the period: William Camden, John Dodderidge, John Stow, Robert Cotton, James Ley, William Lambarde, Francis Thynne, John Davies, and Henry Spelman were some of the more renowned participants of the apparent forty or forty-two members of the Society. Through its enquiries, the Society of Antiquaries encouraged the establishment of a scholarly environment amongst English thinkers which was eventually to become instrumental to the critical examination of legal and institutional history. The extant substantive product of the Society is a collection of papers, which appear to have originally been read by particular members at some of the group’s meetings. Collected and edited in the early eighteenth century, under the title Curious Discourses, these short pieces communicate a real inquisitiveness about the emergence and the history of English laws, customs, and institutions. The ‘discourses’ also demonstrate the adoption of novel methods of scholarly inquiry in that the papers evidence attempts to utilise what we now describe as primary source materials, which, after the dissolution of the monasteries, had become more readily available to a wider community of scholars. More specifically however, the papers also evidence that access to other primary source materials, in the form of legal, royal and heraldic records, was exploited by group members who were, by profession, record keepers, heralds and above all lawyers. The interests of the Society’s membership, demonstrated through the particular topics chosen for discussion, were diverse. However, legal and quasi-legal themes overshadowed all else. Legal topics were nonetheless contextualised and linked with a multitude of distinct subjects such as funeral customs, the extent of land, knights’ fees, titles of the aristocracy, castles, shires, coinage, judicial procedure, lawful combat, the Inns of Court, heralds and forest law. Accordingly, the topics discussed were normally confined, by general consensus, to England, and English sources were similarly the preferred materials of research. These two parameters, the law and Englishness, define (to a certain degree) the character of the Society. But the group was not as insular as might be thought initially. Notwithstanding their backgrounds, the members’ writings show that in many ways their thinking transcended the ideal-type of the contemporary common law mind. A number of the members made occasional references within ‘discourses’ to the models of humanist ideas current on the continent, and the group’s collective 1 Prosopon: The Journal of Prosopography 1 (2006) method of inquiry went well beyond the lawyer’s narrowly purposive and precedent- based research. The advent of printing had recently facilitated a more rapid circulation of new ideas and this, in turn, enhanced the possibilities for textual synthetics. There is also evidence that some members had started to identify potentially disturbing discontinuities in English legal history. Who were the members of this impressive group? Can we say, with any certainty, who was a member? What were they like? What were their backgrounds, their experiences and their connections? Most importantly, perhaps, what were their interests? What do we know about the interests of such a group - and what else might this tell us about the kind of people they were and the times and circumstances in which they lived? These are the questions which this article attempts to address. 2.1 Membership of the Society This preliminary section of the article concerns the identification of the members of the Society of Antiquaries. The sources reveal a pool of a little more than one hundred candidates, all with certain degrees of common interests. The challenge faced here is that of determining focus. An expansive focus can ensure that no actual ‘member’ is excluded from identification - but it risks the inclusion of persons who were not truly participants. A narrow focus, while more capable of excluding the red herrings, necessarily risks the elimination of some legitimate members. However, if one can be fairly precise about chronology of the Society, knowing (for example) the dates when group meetings took place, then some of the candidates for membership might be ruled out on the basis of age. Therefore, before turning to the documentary evidence in itself, some attention should be paid to the initial question of defining ‘the group’ in terms of its temporal boundaries, thus excluding candidates who either died before the group emerged, or who were too young to have been members when group activities ceased. The 1946 Van Norden doctoral thesis, entitled ‘The Elizabethan College of Antiquaries’, totalling over six hundred pages, is an encyclopedic and exhaustive study - but remains unpublished. Van Norden’s second chapter,1 entitled ‘Chronology’, considered the crucial questions of whether we can ascribe precise dates to the formation of the Society or its meetings and (therefore) whether we can say who its members could have been. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of ‘The Occasion of this Discourse’ by Henry Spelman. ‘The Occasion’ was written as a preface to Spelman’s own ‘The Original of the Four Terms of the Year’.2 ‘The Original’ was reduced to a manuscript after the abortive attempt to revivify the Society of Antiquaries in 1614, where the tract would have been delivered orally (although not, of course, necessarily from memory). Its preface (‘The Occasion’) is 1 L. Van Norden, ‘The Elizabethan College of Antiquaries’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California (Los Angeles, 1946), pp. 71-118. This chapter, with some minor revision, was subsequently published as an article: L. Van Norden, ‘Sir Henry Spelman on the Chronology of the Elizabethan College of Antiquaries’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 13 (1949-50), 131-160. The following references cite both the chapter and article. This article, coupled with its predecessor (‘Peiresc and the English Scholars’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 12 [1948-49], 369-89) are the only published elements of the thesis. 2 ‘The Original’ survives in three manuscripts, only one of which is prefixed by ‘The Occasion’: Oxford, Bodleian Library MS e Mus 107, fols. 1-31 (‘The Occasion’ is fols. 1-2). 2 Prosopon: The Journal of Prosopography 1 (2006) therefore ostensibly an explanation of the circumstances under which the ‘The Original of the Four Terms of the Year’ came to be written - but (much more importantly) is itself the only truly primary evidence of the Society’s chronology. While Spelman dated ‘The Original’, he assigned no date to ‘The Occasion’. Van Norden challenged the obvious construal - that ‘The Occasion’ can be taken to be contemporaneous with ‘The Original’. After an exhaustive study she concluded that ‘The Occasion’ must have been completed some ten to twelve years after ‘The Original’, estimating the date at sometime between February 1626 and July 1628.3 Van Norden’s contention is that if the reader takes Spelman’s sentence, ‘grew for twenty years to be discontinued’, and then from 1628 subtracts twenty years of idleness for the Society, one arrives at 1608, which is one year after the latest of the extant ‘discourses’. If by his ‘twenty years’ Spelman means the time which elapsed between the end of regular meetings and his time of writing, ‘a long slumber broken only by the unrealized dream of 1614’,4 then his account is corroborated by the existence of documents recording work of the Society up to 1607, and the nonexistence of such documents after that year. For Van Norden, the only twenty-year lapse Spelman can reasonably mean is from 1607 or 1608 until 1627 or 1628. She discounts the simple arithmetical method in favour of a detailed analysis of the context of ‘The Occasion’, and similarly suggests that: ‘[Spelman’s] statement is blurred for modern readers by his use of the past tense “grew for twenty Years” where good modern usage would require the present perfect, and his use of “then” in the sense of “at - or during - that time” in a context where it could mean “after that time”’. It is, on balance, a most convincing estimation.5 Van Norden’s inference is, at face value, contrary to the statement of Richard Carew in his letter to Robert Cotton6 where in 1605 Carew refers to ‘so long discontynuance’. It seems reasonable to interpret this discontinuance as referring to Carew’s own attendance at meetings rather than the discontinuance of the group given that we have extant ‘discourses’ as late as 1607. The fact the letter was written from Carew’s Cornwall estate in Anthony lends credence to interpretation that the ‘discontynuance’ refers to Carew’s own absence. Van Norden concluded, therefore, that one can rely on Spelman to say that the Society of Antiquaries was established between 1584 and 1586; that it vanished between 1606 and 1608; and that some of its members (and perhaps some others) made a thwarted or unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate the group in 1614. Spelman’s statements, interpreted in this way, are supported by the extant documents of the Society and by other circumstantial evidence. An elementary method for determining membership of the Society is, accordingly, to accept the Van Norden position on chronology. If her hypothesis is correct, then the names of a large number of potential candidates for membership of the Society must be rejected.