Book Review

Three main contentions tie together this stimulating book. First, state formation--not state making--was driven from England's peripheries rather than the center. "The early modern state did not become more active at the expense of society; rather, it did so as a consequence of social need" (16). Second, law was the "incorporative force" (89) at the heart of this process. Finally, though Hindle stresses the social depth of participation, he ascribes the principal effort to develop the state, and the bulk of the benefit derived from it, to the "middling sort." Though the last of these arguments blunts the other two, Hindle generally succeeds in showing why historians of early modern England must do more to join the often separate histories of society, politics, and law.	1
These first two arguments are closely linked. Hindle follows the pioneering work of Christopher Brooks, whose studies of court dockets have established the sharp rise in popular resort to the law in the decades around 1600. Legal change--state formation--resulted from the social crises that beset England in those years. People everywhere responded by asking the law--the state--to help them combat disorder. A chapter on the court of Star Chamber shows that plaintiffs went there because they liked its cheap, speedy process. Complementing Tim Stretton's findings on the court of Requests (Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England [Cambridge, 1998]), Hindle argues that "justice (especially prerogative equity) was almost invariably the demand of those who were relatively weak" (236). Another chapter exploring the increase in criminal prosecutions during the same years builds on the work of Cynthia Herrup (The Common Peace [Cambridge, 1987]) and others who have demonstrated how criminal prosecutions depended upon and articulated shared notions about social order.	2
Most interesting is Hindle's chapter on the growing use of recognizances, by which those who seemed to threaten local order were compelled to give a bond, supported by sureties, to keep the peace. Though previous students of binding over have emphasized the role of justices of the peace in this process, Hindle shows that the initiative lay with private individuals. In their hands, bonds provided a flexible legal instrument by which the peace might be maintained without resorting to criminal prosecutions. Missing though is a discussion of the means for enforcing performance of the terms of such bonds. Arrest for nonperformance or refusal to swear a bond when required by a magistrate was common. An analysis of such confrontations--for instance, when bonds or arrests for nonperformance were challenged by proceedings on certiorari or habeas corpus--would underscore Hindle's insights about the law's ability to negotiate between conflicting ideas about order. Nonetheless, Hindle is certainly right that the escalation in private suits, criminal indictments, and in the use of bonds to keep the peace reflects a broad participation in the law that drove the development of the state and legitimated its existence.	3
Nowhere was this participatory state more ambitious nor more prone to failure than in the provision of poor relief. Efforts to control grain movements in times of dearth met more provincial resistance than support and programs to set vagrants to work in bridewells often fell victim to the costs of such schemes. The state's failures thus demonstrated the same social reality as its successes: provincial people determined the extent of the state's reach in response to the social and economic realities they encountered in their parishes. The Book of Orders, by which the regime of Charles I sought to regulate alehouses and grain supplies nationwide, necessarily meant little in light of the neglect of the orders by local officers who preferred to handle matters according to the dictates of local needs and norms. Provincial England eagerly embraced law as used in the courts, but just as readily rejected law in the form of royal or legislative directives they considered meddlesome.	4
Having established the social depth of participation in state formation, Hindle then confines it to the middling sort, social history's Cheshire cat, showing up everywhere we look and then vanishing on closer inspection. While the category of middling status has made sense when applied to the eighteenth century--and to urban environments--does it help us understand the rural world a century earlier that Hindle examines? "Exclusions," of the poor and disorderly, were "constitutive of the political culture of the middling sort" (203). But can we say that the bulk of those who served as constables and parish overseers formed a distinct and culturally unified group, defined by their rejection of those beneath them? If abhorrence of disorder defined the middling sort, how do we explain the actions of the many village officers--archetypes of the middling--who committed their share of petty crimes and misdemeanors? Given what we know about the life cycle component of poverty, what should we make of those who served in local offices during one part of their lives and received poor relief in another? Those punished for showing hospitality to the poor were often of the same middling station as those imposing the punishments. Did parish elites really constitute a coherent group that stood across a social and cultural divide from those whose lives they were meant to regulate?	5
Narrowing the range of local participants in state formation in part results from the removal of some of the marvelous archival material from the Exchequer of Cheshire that enriched the Cambridge doctoral thesis on which this book is based. By dropping the evidence of huge amounts of litigation in an active local venue--a venue also created by the state--we lose sight of the best signs available of broad participation in the state. In palatine courts at Chester and Durham, as well as in church courts and other local jurisdictions, recent scholarship has unearthed plenty of evidence of the kind of social depth in the use of resources provided by the state, which would seem to be denied by a limiting label such as "middling sort." Thousands of litigants pursued their grievances in hundreds of small urban courts throughout this period, many, if not most, of whom would not fit under even the most loose definitions of middling. When the middling were involved in civil suits, it was typically with others of the same ilk, suggesting that the middling experienced at least as much conflict with one another as with those beneath them socially. If the middling contended more with each other than with those below them, and if the non-middling employed state resources to great effect for their own purposes, does the label help us explain what happened and why as people used the law and thereby helped to form the state?	6
Such questions are intended to encourage Hindle and those who follow him to continue to explore the social content of politics and state formation in the early modern world, a world of broader and more varied forms of participation than we previously appreciated. By helping us to see this, Steve Hindle has written an important book, one that every student of early modern law and society will need to grapple with. Hindle's arguments are subtle; his synthesis of an enormous and varied historiography is compelling. Best of all, by uniting and extending the work of a wide range of other historians, he has put legal history where it belongs: at the heart of early modern social and political history.	7
Paul D. Halliday University of Virginia

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