Law and ‘community’

Brooks, Christopher W.

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511757372.010

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…It has been estimated that the county had approximately forty-five attorneys in 1640, one of the largest county contingents in the country; this was due to the large number of landowners domiciled in the county. 63 These attorneys also occupied most local offices. 64 Relatively free of government control and supervision, families with such trusted attorneys may have comprised some of the people who would have delighted in the depiction of Thrifty in The Humorous Magistrate.…”

Section: The Country Attorneymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Magistrate — and Humorous Magistrates — in Early Seventeenth-Century England

Knafla

2011

Early Theatre

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As we have seen, The Humorous Magistrate features-in the representation of Justice Thrifty and his professional activities-a characterization of the legal system and its officials during the personal rule of Charles I. Among the play's themes are some generally held concerns about legal process: judicial corruption and the failure of the central state to govern rural localities according to customary traditions. These issues engage what historians have called the contest between 'court and country', the reforming zeal that evangelical Anglicans and Puritans brought to the reform of the law, and the enmity that Charles I and his privy council had engendered in their (by the standards of the reformers) arbitrary rule during the 1630s. It has been established that the play was written by John Newdigate III (1600-42), 1 a prominent gentleman and lawyer of the West Midlands. Newdigate was the eldest son of Sir John and Anne Newdigate (née Fitton), a prominent Warwickshire family allied with several quasi-Puritan or reformminded gentry families such as the Burdetts, Egertons, Holcrofts, Leighs, Greasleys, and Hastings, whose members included prominent lawyers and JPs who were allied in sentiment to the law reformers of the age. While John Newdigate attended Gray's Inn and the Inner Temple, and was later involved in considerable litigation, there is no evidence that he studied for the bar. He was elected sheriff of Warwickshire in 1625, as member of parliament in 1628, and was on the commission of the peace from 1630, though there is no evidence that he was an active magistrate. His greatest interests seem to have been in mixed farming and coal-mining, accompanied by a keen eye for poetry and the theatre. The extended family's legal inheritance stemmed from Sir John Newdigate II, who sought to serve as a godly magistrate, and his second son Richard (1602-78)-who became a bencher of Gray's Inn, JP, and assize judge who defended reform members of parliament imprisoned by the crown, assisted in Laud's impeachment, and was later appointed to

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Section: The Country Attorneymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Magistrate — and Humorous Magistrates — in Early Seventeenth-Century England

Knafla

2011

Early Theatre

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“…33 Legal scholars agree that the spatial and social organisation that characterised Lincoln's Inn was broadly representative of the Inner and Middle Temple and of Gray's Inn. 34 Each Inn had a hall; a chapel; a library; chambers where the inhabitants studied, worked and slept; and butteries, kitchens and other functional areas. Spatial organisation and domestic architecture reinforced the social and professional hierarchy of the common law.…”

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confidence: 99%

Engendering Erudition: Masculinity and Legal Authority at England's Medieval Inns of Court

McVitty¹

2020

Gender & History

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These lawyers are worldly men, not men of the sterile caste. .. they are in their way learned, cultivated men, linguists, logicians, tenacious disputants, true lovers of the nice case and the mootpoint. They are gregarious, clubbable men, grouping themselves in hospices, which become schools of law, multiplying manuscripts, arguing, learning and teaching, the great mediators between life and logic, a reasoning, reasonable element in the English nation. 1

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Law and ‘community’

Cited by 2 publications

References 19 publications

The Magistrate — and Humorous Magistrates — in Early Seventeenth-Century England

The Magistrate — and Humorous Magistrates — in Early Seventeenth-Century England

Engendering Erudition: Masculinity and Legal Authority at England's Medieval Inns of Court

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