Matthew Hale

This is an introductory essay to a critical edition of Hale's MS treatise on natural law (British Library, MSS Add. 18235, Harley 7159, and Hargrave 485). Chapters 1-5 were published along with this introduction. An edition of the entire treatise (chapters 1-13) is now available in the Sources in Early Modern Economics, Ethics, and Law series published by CLP Academic (2015).

This essay argues that the 1675 conviction of John Taylor by the Court of King’s Bench for slandering God reveals Chief Justice Matthew Hale implementing a model of conjoint law-making between courts, parliament, and crown that gave pre-eminent power to the common lawyers, and none to the Church of England. In doing so, it complicates the prevailing literature on Restoration English law, which has treated the law as hierarchical, with the common lawyers subordinate to the sovereign. Rather than following statute or ecclesiastical law, which emphasised the spiritual nature of crimes like Taylor’s, Hale located Taylor’s offence in the exclusively temporal common law jurisdiction of defamation, which existed largely outside of monarchical purview. Hale’s judgment reflected his rhetoric of judicial office outside the courtroom, where he argued the judiciary worked alongside king and parliament in making law, but were not subservient to these institutions, for common lawyers relied on sources of law beyond sovereign-made statute. The language of sovereignty as hierarchical was thus a factional attack on an independent common law, an attempt to subordinate the common lawyers to the crown that was resisted by the lawyers like Hale in his rhetoric and exercise of office.

Sir Matthew Hale (1609-1676) is one of the most celebrated jurists of English common law. This essay introduces the importance of Matthew Hale’s Christian faith for his life in general, as well as his legal thought. It surveys Hale's theological writings and examines his theory of natural law.

There was a particular way of understanding and explaining changes in matter’s quantity whose first exposition can be traced back to the Renaissance in Girolamo Cardano’s classification of the natural motions of the universe, particularly in the motions of impulsus and attractio. Cardano’s exposition was read attentively by Francis Bacon, whose idea of “motion of liberty” both modified and retained elements of the Cardanian view. The Baconian treatment of the motion of liberty made its way well into the seventeenth century in the works of Francis Glisson and Matthew Hale, who draw heavily on it to provide their own account of rarefaction and condensation. The aim of this essay is to reconstruct the history of the accounts of the processes of rarefaction and condensation held by these authors in order to examine the ramifications of the Cardanian approach in the seventeenth century. This history will not only provide us with new instruments for understanding the intellectual relationship between the Renaissance and the early modern period but also improve our understanding of the transformation of the world picture across the emergence of early modern science.

‘Theory’ is taken for granted as an object of historical study, especially in relation to the history of political thought, and most historiography proceeds as if little were lost by construing authors such as Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Smith as ‘theorists’. This article argues that the costs are likely to be high, and that in consequence ‘theory’ ought not to be considered a generic category capable of neutrally describing a given piece of thinking from the past. On the one hand, ascribing theoretical argument can obscure the nature of rival idioms for making claims regarding political life, such as biblical criticism, the common law, and ‘office talk’. On the other hand, the evidence suggests that the ‘political theorist’, as an avowed identity, only emerged in Britain late in the eighteenth century, tentatively and under the force of peculiar pressures. It follows that it will rarely be appropriate to use the term before c. 1800, and considerable caution will still be necessary when using the label in the post-1800 period. Abiding by this discipline is likely to lead to new discoveries in what has been a flat terrain of ‘political theory’.

The spread of the British Empire was accompanied by the relocation of legal doctrines, which took on new meanings and uses. This article follows the relocation to Mandate Palestine of the common-law doctrine of corroboration of victim testimony in sex offense cases. In England, corroboration was a cautionary rule that expressed mistrust of female complainants. In jury-less Palestine, the rule also expressed deep distrust toward non-English complainants, especially children. While the British rulers of Palestine prided themselves on imposing sexual regulation tailored to protecting women and children, an analysis of the way corroboration was applied in that setting reveals a rigidly imposed and hard-to-meet evidentiary standard. British colonial judges maintained that demanding corroboration in sex offense cases was an implementation of English law. However, the rule was not simply a ‘transplant’ that reproduced the original but, rather, acquired its meaning within the specific socia...