No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth: The 'Lower Branch' of the Legal Profession in Early Modern England
... Brooks comments that this situation was primarily associated with ideas about the function of the law: "Writers from Sir John Fortescue in the late fifteenth century to Sir Henry Finch in the early seventeenth thought that law was the means by which society was held together." 16 In this context "lawsuits were a potential breach of the social order, more the result of the ill will of men than a product of business dealings or personal accident," and led to the pursuit of unethical self-interest by dishonest lawyers. 17 However, litigation was not a lawyer's most important activity, nor the one that most raised people's concerns. ...
The premiere of George Ruggle’s Latin play Ignoramus in 1615 proved to be the first step in a long history of revivals, translations, and adaptations that reached its zenith in the early decades of the Restoration. Much of its success is owed to its timely participation in the politico-legal debates held between Royalists and parliamentarians throughout the first half of the century. The renewed interest in Ignoramus in the Restoration confirmed the permanence of its political significance. This essay focuses on the influence that Ruggle’s play exerted on the anonymus comedy The Woman Turned Bully, which premiered and was printed in 1675, and analyzes how the figure of the Ignoramus lawyer was criticized by foregrounding the threats that the alliance between common law and Puritan ideology could still pose in Restoration society.
Beyond charters, printed propaganda, and cosmographies, aspiring statesmen in Jacobean England engaged with Native Americans in commonplace books, poetry, court masques, and political debate. Rather than representing a remote ‘other’, this article contends that barristers and students of the law were fascinated by the perceived savagery of indigenous peoples because it allowed them to explore, interrogate, and define their own civility. The result was a cross-over between developing English articulations of their own behaviour and political responsibilities, and a rising enthusiasm for colonizing America. With their Whitehall masques and passionate pleas in parliament on behalf of Virginia and Virginian tobacco, members of the Inns engaged in a subversive wit culture that reconciled the exotic with the language of duty and good conduct, and helped turn colonization into a recognizable – and, for the first time, fashionable – element of early seventeenth-century political culture. By considering written discourse alongside tobacco smoking and court masques, this article contends that a broad approach to the socio-cultural world of Jacobean politics reveals some ways through which gentlemen consciously projected their civil state as one that might be strengthened, rather than weakened, by turning to America as a viable theatre for political involvement.
Definitions and Sources of LawRoyal Parliaments and Statute LawCrown Courts and Case LawCanon and Customary LawsLawyers, Literature and EducationConclusionACKNOWLEDGEMENT
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.