Unwritten Verities

This is an ambitious attempt to combine two distinctive features of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English common law: its dependence on oral tradition and its reliance on law French. In the first part of the book, the author, Sebastian Sobecki, draws on recent scholarship about late medieval bilingualism in order to reinterpret the retention of law French by the profession. Law French is treated as one element in a broader vernacular language that was neither English nor French, but a hybrid ‘franglais’. Rather than reflecting a professional introspectiveness, law French was thus compatible with principles of consultative and representative parliamentary government. Repelling all charges of anachronism, Sobecki reads the works of Sir John Fortescue as exemplifying the ‘idea of the common law as a conciliar force that can widen social participation in the English polity’ (p. 129). In the second part of the book, Sobecki looks forward to the sixteenth century. St German’s Doctor and Student invoked on the king’s behalf the common law’s unwritten tradition in order to assert its universal, representative and hence binding claims. John Rastell’s printing in English of legal texts reflected a renewed impulse towards political participation—one that fostered the spirit behind the risings of 1549. Nevertheless, this vision faced challenges from humanist elitism (represented by Sir Thomas Elyot), from a centralising state (the proposed reforms of the Inns of Court in the 1530s) and from censorship (the Stationers’ Company and the Elizabethan Star Chamber). As its title suggests, the book perceives parallels between the decline of oral learning in the Inns of Court and the Reformation’s assault on the unwritten traditions of the old Church. James Simpson’s influential thesis that late medieval freedom and plurality contracted under early modern authoritarianism and uniformity underpins the book’s argument. The afterword envisages the suppression of the Inns’ spirit of political and religious argumentativeness in the second half of the sixteenth century; one wonders whether James VI and I would have recognised that scenario

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