Christopher W. Brooks. Law, Politics and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 468 pp. $130.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-32391-8.

Reviewed by Tim Stretton (St. Mary’s University)
Published on H-Albion (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Margaret McGlynn

The Long Arms of the Law

For decades now the law has enjoyed a walk-on part in most political, constitutional, social, economic, and gender histories of early modern England. With this stunning new study Christopher Brooks shows what can happen if it is given a leading role. The result is much more than an exercise in compensatory history–say, a beefing up of attention to legal history to match the influence of religious history. It boldly integrates the law in all its forms into the political and social histories of the period from 1485 until 1642, providing fresh insights into topics ranging from the reformation of religion and resistance to the innovations of Charles I to popular protest, poor relief, and relations between husbands and wives and masters and servants. In subtle but fundamental ways its arguments reshape the contours of the early modern landscape and call into question a number of recent theories about the nature of English social relations and accepted chronologies of change.

One of the underlying arguments of this book is that legal culture infused early modern English society to a degree not seen before or since. To establish the extent of this influence Brooks maps out in careful detail the astonishing range of ideas, institutions, jurisdictions, personnel, laws, and regulations that the banner of “the law” encompassed in Tudor and early Stuart England, as well as the relationships it helped to define. The book is divided into two parts, deftly combining a chronological approach with a thematic one. The first eight chapters analyze the law from the center outwards, beginning with the nature of legal thought and practice in the fifteenth century and running through the upheavals of the break from Rome, and the jurisdictional clash produced by the retaining of ecclesiastical justice, the legal issues raised by multiple kingdoms beginning with Wales, the dramatic expansion in litigation and lawyers in the decades after 1570, and the constitutional issues raised during the reigns of James and Charles Stuart that reached their climax in the 1640s. Organizing this familiar history around the law produces unexpected insights and reveals the richness and the fluidity of ideas circulating and evolving in a profession that on its face, and in much of its own rhetoric, can appear conservative and unchanging. Brooks relies heavily on two under-used sources: moots and readings on statutes at the Inns of Court, which illuminate lawyers’ views of law, doctrine, and jurisdiction; and the charges judges and powerful citizens read on circuit to assize and quarter sessions juries and assembled audiences, which provide a sense of how legal values were presented to the community. These speeches, delivered in their thousands all over the country, presented an idealized vision of justice that could border on propaganda, but their ubiquity would have made the ideas they extolled familiar to the majority of ordinary citizens.

Brooks elaborates on this point in the second part of the book, which focuses more broadly on the effect of the law on different groups and classes of people in the wider community. A sustained analysis of local jurisdictions, from manor courts, leet courts, borough courts, church courts, and piepowder courts, to the enforcement of statutes and regulations by magistrates and local constables underlines just how deeply the tentacles of the law penetrated into English communities. Justice touched everyone in this society, making the legal profession’s collective belief in the importance of due process familiar to all but the most marginal members of society. For Brooks the implications of this saturation of society and culture with the different interwoven strands of the law are self-evident. Firstly, there was no obvious divide between elite and popular concepts of order, because everyone was familiar with the justice system and so many made use of it or appealed to it; for example, the litigants who went to law in the hundreds of thousands and the agitators in violent rural protests who overwhelmingly couched their demands in terms of the right application of existing law, rather than in calls for the overthrow or rejection of the legal system. Secondly, the dominant ideology of lawyers and legal officials, which Brooks teases out through what amounts to a collective biography of a profession, was surprisingly benign. The majority of early modern jurists believed that human law derived from the community, following logic familiar from Aristotle and Cicero, and that it should serve the community, without regard for social standing. And in practice the wider community did shape the common law and equity, through their interactions with the system and their demands for justice and an expanding range of legal remedies. Everyone was aware that wealth could influence justice, and Brooks is sensitive to the limited rights and legal relief available to the desperately poor. Nevertheless, on balance the system was sound at its heart and difficult to characterize as an elaborate elite conspiracy to control the masses. Neighbors could be fractious, suing each other in record numbers, lawyers often disagreed and occasionally fell to blows, certain judges succumbed to crown pressure during the personal rule of Charles I, and individual examples of corruption were not unknown. However, the rule of law “provided a playing-field on which the poor and the middling could co-exist with the rich” (p. 428) and the lawyers and judges who implemented the law espoused noble aims and went a considerable way towards meeting them.

The combination of the organic nature of legal knowledge and the innovations spurred by litigants’ demands mark out the law as an important agent of change. Indeed, legal ideas and institutions helped drive even the largest-scale social and political transformations, such as the rise of the state and the eventual triumph of the idea of individual liberty. In a society where successive monarchs distributed lucrative monopolies in acts of patronage, and guilds fiercely asserted their exclusive rights to control production and markets, it was lawyers and judges who expressed unease at restrictions on trade and consistently advocated greater economic freedom for individuals. Legal rhetoric also provided an important alternative to hierarchical depictions of society that emphasized unequal relationships of obligation and deference, through the common law emphasis on personal liberty and equality before the law and the civil lawyers’ championing of equity. In the more private realm of the household, Brooks argues that patriarchalism, such a powerful idea in the political rhetoric of the early seventeenth century, had little purchase with lawyers and judges. Instead they invoked the emerging logic of contract when conceptualizing or intervening in relationships between wives and husbands, parents and children, and masters and servants.

Not every reader will be convinced by all of Brooks’ wider arguments, or share his clear admiration for the intellectual traditions of the common law and his appreciation of the integrity and decency of most of the men who administered it. Such a sustained focus on the law naturally requires a focus on records produced by lawyers and legal institutions, and just as a history of a prison written from prison records might give the private beliefs of inmates short shrift, so too a number of Brooks’ conclusions about ordinary people have to remain largely implicit. Nevertheless, the depth of his erudition and the sophistication and originality of his arguments make this a book that no one seeking to understand English society can afford to ignore.

Throughout his career Brooks has charted a course beyond the traditional limits of legal history, with its tendency to focus on legal technicalities and the genealogy of doctrine, to explore the workings of law in wider society. The prominence of his own works in the footnotes of this one demonstrates how few historians have so far followed his lead, something that is bound to change in the wake of this book. But the dearth of quality scholarship on the role of law in society is largely due to the technical knowledge and skills it requires. Brooks’ ability to penetrate the fog of the law’s technical language and to explain complicated legal instruments, procedures, and fictions in elegant and accessible prose therefore make this an invaluable work of reference as well as a book that deserves, and demands, to be read from cover to cover.

Max Lieberman. The March of Wales: A Borderland of Medieval Britain 1067-1300. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. viii + 146 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7083-2116-4; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7083-2115-7.

Reviewed by David Crouch
Published on H-Albion (November, 2009)
Commissioned by Margaret McGlynn

The Limits of Border Studies

This is a difficult book to classify, for it fits easily neither the category of monograph nor textbook, and has some of the characteristics of both genres. Perhaps the best solution is to take it as a pair with, or perhaps a taster for, Dr. Lieberman’s forthcoming monograph, taken from his Oxford DPhil thesis, “The Medieval March of Wales: The Creation and Perception of a Frontier, 1066-1283,” to be published in the series, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought. The book reviewed here is not so narrow a study. It provides a summary of scholarship on the development of the March of Wales and is keen to point out questions (though without necessarily resolving them) which are still to be settled by scholarship, such as the nature of colonization and the impact of a bureaucratic state on frontier communities. Its intention is to be comprehensive. The book first offers a chronological treatment of the development of the March, up to the extinction of the native dynasty of Gwynedd in 1283 and the absorption of its principality into the royal demesne. The next chapter looks at immigration and urbanization within the newly conquered lordships and the effect of constant warfare on their economies. The third chapter deals with ethnicity and its attendant features of language, law, and manners. It is the last two chapters which add something extra: a contextualization of the Welsh March in the setting first of the British Isles, and then in the much broader field of Europe. In all this Dr. Lieberman is following on in the wake of Sir Rees Davies, the director of his doctoral studies, whose abiding enthusiasm for the history of medieval Wales did not render him in the least parochial. It was he who did so much to make the idea of “British” studies as fashionable as it has been over the past two decades.

I want however to start with the final chapter of the book, where we find the influence of a different British scholar. A broad context of frontier studies is laid out for us in a thoughtful and engaging chapter. Dr. Lieberman focuses for comparison here on the Neumark of Brandenburg, a difficult area of study. It is a region which was fought over historiographically for well over a century by armies of scholars, in much the same way as it had been warred over by Slavonic and Germanic raiders and colonizers throughout the Middle Ages. The political and racial purposes of rival nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and Polish scholars to justify or contest the territorial ambitions of imperial Germany was the point at issue for earlier generations. Postwar scholarship may have been freed from that deterministic concern, but the scholars of a new Europe have been equally concerned to find in Brandenburg and its Neumark evidence of the sort of cultural transference and shifting identity which fits the “frontier thesis” based on the work of Frederick Jackson Turner, a thesis which envisions borders as zones of interaction, not lines on a map. Here Dr. Lieberman is treading close behind Robert Bartlett. In his Making of Europe (1993), Bartlett used the Germanic aristocratic colonization process east of the Oder to demonstrate how a European model of organization was imposed with the expanding lordship of a particular dynasty, but where Bartlett juxtaposed Albert the Bear of Brandenburg with John de Courcy of Ulster, Dr. Lieberman offers a comparison with the March of Wales. In terms of Germany he doesn’t go far beyond Bartlett and the literature he used. He even revisits the same case study of the rise of the von Wedel family. The shallowness of the synthesis here is a pity, as this is where the potential to offer larger insights is most obvious. Since Bartlett wrote there has been a lot of work on the area of Brandenburg and Pomerania, taking a wider Germano-Slavonic perspective, led by Jan M. Piskorski.[1] But what Dr. Lieberman does do is reflect productively on how Bartlett’s thesis works in a broader survey of British borderlands, and introduce some criticism of the oversimplicity of Bartlett’s analysis from the British perspective. He attempts to set out the case for Anglicization, rather than Europeanization being the issue.

Reading backwards through the book in fact helps clarify where Dr. Lieberman is coming from, if you prefer working from the wider perspective to the particular. The penultimate chapter is a contextualization of the Welsh March in Great Britain, and here we encounter again the idea of Anglicization as a mechanism. It is here that he illustrates the pervasive power of the model of the English state to destabilize neighboring realms. He takes as his earliest example the ability of Mercia to organize under Offa and raise a massive frontier ditch to contain the Welsh middle kingdom, Powys. The famous dyke is taken as a lesson in how a centralizing powerful monarchy can influence less organized neighbors. Shires, hundreds, and hidation follow wherever English lordship intruded, as indeed they did elsewhere, in northern England and ultimately Ireland. Even where the colonizing lord was not the king, the apparatus of the English state was often adapted by him for his own use in his new lordship. Here the dominant influence is another Oxford scholar, James Campbell, and his thesis of the precocious nature of the pre-Conquest English state.

The remainder of the chapters–the first three in fact–are what we would expect. We have studies of ethnicity within the March, its economic development under the impulse of a colonizing aristocracy, and its political development. Here Dr. Lieberman is revisiting the ideas and conclusions of Rees Davies, and the nature of the book as a synthesis is most evident. It  becomes much more obviously the textbook, seeking to explain themes in the light of current scholarship. Which really leads to the question one wants to ask about this book. For whom is it intended? It originated in a series of lectures to undergraduates at Oxford, but there are few universities outside Wales where the medieval Welsh March is routinely taught. I would hazard that not even all Welsh universities teach it. The book is accessible enough for sixth formers, but what A-level or baccalaureate course needs it? Though it may appeal to those studying the broader field of the medieval frontier, it would only be as ancillary reading. It lacks the thoroughness and intellectual independence to be a monograph. The reviewer is therefore bemused as to whom to recommend the book. I should certainly assure the potential reader that I got something out of it. The book has clarity and errors are rare. The standards of production of the University of Wales Press are high, and there are many useful maps. Whether or not I agreed with the overall thesis and emphasis of the book, it is full of telling details, some of them–those to do with the area of Dr. Lieberman’s area of doctoral study–unfamiliar.

Note

[1]. Accessible to the Anglophone in “The Medieval Colonization of Central Europe as a Problem of World History and Historiography,” German History, 22 (2004): 323-342.

Written by Leon Engelbrecht

Simply spell-binding! In the words of that mangler of English, George W Bush, “unputdownable”.

Former British Army military policeman Tony le Tissier is arguably the finest English-language historian of the Battle of Berlin. As the last British commandant of Spandau prison he had the opportunity to live in Berlin and thoroughly explore its surrounds.

This, combined with an interest in history, resulted in several excellent books on the climactic battle of the European section of World War Two: the 1945 Battle of Berlin. Notable among these are Zhukov at the Oder about the battle before the city; Race for the Reichstag about fighting in the city; and Slaughter at Halbe about the destruction of the German 9^th Army in the Spreewald (Spree forest) south of the city. I addition edited survivors’ accounts With our backs to Berlin as well as Death was our Companion and translated Helmut Altner’s Berlin Totentanz (Berlin Dance of Death).

All of that knowledge is synthesised into this must-have book – and more. Berlin Battlefield Guide is very literally a tour guide to the Oder and Berlin battlefields. Organised into 15 day trips, it can only be described as indispensable to anyone visiting the city and wishing to experience Zhukov’s triumph and Hitler’s Götterdämmerung; and, perhaps more importantly, can be considered critical to understanding the battle.

Amply supplied with extracts of topical topographic maps and well illustrated with photographs – both then and now – the book is an almost perfect substitute for understanding the geography of the battle for those of us who have not had the pleasure of visiting the German capital.

Maps are generally the main weakness of most campaign histories, being monochrome, partial and sometimes inaccurate. Le Tissier’s detailed, full-colour and scaled, maps are therefore a joy to study. Even better, they are fully-annoted: the author has marked visiting spots as well as points of interest. Both are fully described in the accompanying text.

To illustrate: Tour “A” is a day-trip to the Seelow heights and Reitwein spur in the Oderbruch, scene of Zhukov at the Oder. Stop “A1” is at the Seelow Museum, just east of the town with the same name. Here is a former East German museum and Soviet monument as well as a well-tended war cemetery. “In the far corner is an observation point overlooking the Oderbruch valley below with a small concrete table model of the terrain. The photographs show a typical Soviet memorial and an impeccable graveyard. The view from the observation spot is indeed stunning – and helpful for it overlooks the former Reichstrasse 1, the main Soviet axis-of adcance. Le Tissier amplifies the experience by including a annoted topographic map of the same view showing the German defences (down to company/battalion level, using current map symbols) and the Soviet order of attack (at the regimental level).

Topographic maps are of less use in cities, and for the town tours Le Tissier substitutes sketch maps showing the routes he describes. He urges the visitor to obtain a tourist map of the city to augment these. Sadly they are not as detailed as the rural maps and less annoted. A pity, but still much better than anything this reviewer has ever seen. The text and photographs, however, make up for this

defect. One can thus follow the various Soviet attacks to the government district where Hitler awaited his fate beneath the wreck of the Reichskanzlei (Reich’s Chancellery).

The massive Zoo and Humboldthain flak towers receive their due as does Army Headquarters along the Bendlerstrasse, headquarters of the botched July 20 coup against Hitler. In the courtyard here, now a memorial, Colonel Claus Graf von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators were shot early in the morning of July 21. A few months later the signals bunker in the same courtyard served as General Helmuth Weidling’s headquarters. Weidling, commander of the 56^th Panzerkorps of the 9^th Army had the misfortune of being appointed Berlin defence commandant when his retreat from the Oderbruch took him into the city. (The bulk of the Army fell back south of the city to die in the Spreewald and one other corps retreated north.) It was he who surrendered the city to Zhukov on May 2.

The flak towers were impressive structures that deserve more recognition than they have to date received. These massive forts were fitted with artillery ranging from 20mm to 128mm and largely manned by teenaged Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) under Luftwaffe control. The Zoo (Tiergarten) towers were demolished, but the Humboldthain complex still exists, half buried in wartime rubble.

Le Tissier also provides a glimpse of Hitler’s Germania – his plans for post-war Berlin as epicentre of a Nazi world. Also well documented is the area of the Führerbunker as well as the escape routes tried by its denizens, including Nazi party boss Reichleiter Martin Bormann, SS Brigadeführer (SS Major General) Wilhelm Mohnke and Traudl Junge, the latter Hitler’s favourite secretary. (Mohnke commanded the government district). The Friedrichstrasse railway bridge looks rustic now but was a scene of utter carnage on the night of May 1^st/2^nd. A breakout attempt led by SS Brigadeführer Dr Gustav Krukenberg (commanding the 11^th SS Panzergrenadierdivision) was slaughtered there.

Moving into the postwar era, Le Tissier also guides us to the the famous “Checkpoint Charlie”, the remnants of the Berlin Wall and Spandau prison where Nazis such as Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and Germania architect (and armaments minister) Albert Speer were imprisoned.

Along the way we pass the scene of the 1953 anti-Soviet riots that Stalin had suppressed with T34 tanks, the German-Russian museum at Karlhorst where the final German was signed on the night of May 8, and the Schöneberg town hall balcony where US President said “Ich bin ein berliner (I am a jam doughnut. The correct German is: Ich bin Berliner.)

Out of town again, this time to Potsdam and the Wannsee. Here is the country house where SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann in 1942 chaired the so-called Wannsee conference where the fate of Europe’s Jews, gypsies and others were determined: extermination. Nearby is Schloss Cecilienhof, venue in July 1945, of the Potsdam conference. The lawn outside is still graced by a large flowerbed in the shape of a red Soviet five-pointed star in a white circle. (Le Tissier photographed it while it was flowering.) Literally down the road from here is the Glienicke bridge where Cold War spy exchanges took place ad the KGB prison where those destined for exchange were kept prior to release.

Back in Berlin, those wishing to learn about repression in the German Democratic Republic can visit Stasi headquarters in Normannenstrasse and the camouflaged Hohenschönhausen Prison in Genslerstrasse.

South-east of the city is the Spreewald and the grave of the 9^th Army as well as that of their foes. The forests also cover the German Army General Staff’s headquarters (the “Zeppelin” and Maybach” complexes at Waldstadt near Zossen) as well as the nearby post-war headquarters of the Soviet Group of Forces Germany at Wünsdorf. Further away, at Falkenhagen, towards Seelow, lies Speer’s Tabun and Sarin nerve gas factories. The underground Tabun factory with its 5m thick walls became the Warsaw Pact’s nuclear blast proof command bunker during the Cold War.

All this and more in one volume! Have you ordered yours yet?

Berlin Battlefield Guide – Third Reich &Cold War

Tony le Tissier

Pen & Sword

Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK

2008