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Book Review
| Reid Barbour, John Selden: Measures of the Holy Commonwealth in Seventeenth-Century England, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Pp. x + 417. $70 (ISBN 0-8020-8776-0).Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward's "Laws" in Early Modern Political Thought, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 343. $75 (ISBN 0-521-79131-6).
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With this book on John Selden, Reid Barbour has succeeded at two rarely attempted tasks. The first is to study the formidable corpus of work that Selden published, decades of scholarship, editions, essays, and collections, on topics seemingly chosen by authorial idiosyncrasy or topical engagement, awkward folios in opaque Latin. The second is to connect the work of this polymath and lawyer to the religious culture in which Selden chose to function—not only the crises and controversies in which Selden played a role, but an intellectual and political milieu pervaded by religion.
Despite his famous quips in the Table Talk [Barbour writes], that civil magistrates determine the shape and practices of the religion of their people, the societies that Selden studies are—every one of them—comprehensively religious. ... [T]he social unit in question subsumes all of its practices, habits of thought, customs, institutions, and history under a predominantly shared sense of divine dispensations and warrants. (4)
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The term "holy commonwealth" was coined by the Puritan controversialist Richard Baxter to describe the enterprise that occupied England's intellectuals and politicians during the reigns of Elizabeth I and her Stuart successors. It was Baxter, Barbour notes, who recorded what Sir Matthew Hale said of Selden—that he had been "a great adversary" to Thomas Hobbes, and that Hale "had seen [Selden] oppose [Hobbes] so earnestly as either to depart from him, or drive him out of the room" (5). And Selden, Barbour argues, never himself abandoned the idea of establishing such a holy commonwealth. "[T]he farther he moved from investigating early British pagan, early British Christian, Greco-Roman, and 'Syrian' cultures towards his final Judaic studies, the more the absolute integrity of religion in the society under scrutiny became crucial" (4). |
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Varying the approach taken by previous scholars (particularly Paul Christianson and David Berkowitz, as well as a provocative sketch by A. L. Rowse), this study is written from the books out; it is less a study of career and connections than a commentary on the themes that develop across the pages of Selden's writings. Barbour emphasizes the harmonies that Selden believed could be found between religion and broader culture. His glosses of classical nomoi examined a term that could mean either law or song and that was bound up with religious observance. His edition of Eadmer drew connections between the Norman era and the Stuart regime, recovering the history of a church that had resisted an aggressive arriviste dynasty. He sought in the Sanhedrin as a model for government, an assembly of grave and learned patriarchs, expert in both matters of divinity and of government. Fond of metaphor and suggestion, he was willing to entertain the idea that revelation might arrive in prophetic dreams. |
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A characteristic remark of Selden's, preserved in the Table Talk, is "There's no such thing as Spirituall Jurisdiction, all is civill, the Churches is the same with the Lord Mayors" (307). Yet the witticisms and insights of the Table Talk, thoughtfully analyzed here, betray Selden's familiarity with church politics, and even an educated taste in sermons (he believed that Caroline sermons had declined from the high Jacobean standard). He perceptively quoted Scripture: in arguing against the coercive effects of excommunication, he noted that the New Testament did not forbid transgressors from receiving the sacraments—had not Jesus admitted Judas to the Last Supper? Those with whom he sat at table likely included the learned Archbishop James Ussher and the clever, tolerant, flawed John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln and disgraced Lord Chancellor. Ussher and Hobbes were both reported present at Selden's deathbed, apparently vying for precedence, a historical contretemps that may also be read as an intellectual parable. |
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The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution, by Janelle Greenberg, examines an idea that perennially served, across the course of Selden's long career, as a popular and durable frame of reference for discussions of government: the idea that England was governed by its "ancient constitution," that the nation's common law and political institutions possessed their authority because they had operated since Saxon or even British days. Two texts have been commonly associated with this ideologically assertive and historically dubious conception, The Mirror of Justices and the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum (both works of the fourteenth century, recklessly misinterpreted as pre-Conquest treatises). Greenberg makes a major contribution to the discussion by highlighting the importance of the Leges Edwardi Confessoris, thirty-nine laws allegedly promulgated by Edward the Confessor and confirmed in 1070 by William the Conqueror. Though the Leges Edwardi were likely compiled early in the twelfth century, the collection was known to Bracton and to the barons and lawyers who stood behind Magna Carta; the laws enjoyed respect because of the medieval cult of the Confessor, but gained new prominence, in Stuart days, because of their celebrated Chapter Seventeen, which suggested that the monarch who governs badly thereby "loses the very name of king" (62). |
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This book is deeply researched and elegantly written, with a marvelously thorough bibliography (although the publishing schedule apparently foreclosed mention of recent work by James Tubbs and David Seipp). It is particularly valuable for discussing other legendary Norman precedents upon which the case for the ancient constitution was built—Sharnborn's Case and the Penenden Heath controversy, for example—and for its studies of individual figures who constructed or sheltered within the architecture of the ancient constitution (Camden, Spelman, and Coke, Doctor John Cowell and Sir John Hayward, Sir Roger Owen and Nathaniel Bacon, the judges of the Ship Money Case, Lilburne, Walwyn, and the Levellers, and finally the pamphleteers and parliamentarians who engineered the Glorious Revolution, as articulate a constellation of intellects as ever debated an issue, and as bitterly divided). Any scholar working on law or government in the Stuart century will profit from this book. |
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| Alan D. Boyer
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| New York, N.Y. |
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