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Legal Proof and Probability in Early Modern England

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Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences

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Abstract

In early modern England, the practical need to convict accused criminals on evidence that amounted to less than certainty vexed legal theorists and practitioners. The perceived unsuitability of mere probability conflicted with the ideal of certainty and the pragmatic need for jurors to reason inductively; consequently, probability was inconsistently treated by legal theorists and practitioners including Bacon and Coke. This elasticity in the way probability was conceived and put to use shows up in the trial of Sir Walter Raleigh and in Ben Jonson’s play, Volpone. Raleigh’s trial and Jonson’s play illustrate an interesting moment in the history of probability, specifically in law, when established and emerging concepts enabled probability to be presented as having one side—the similar, plausible, or provable, which in bulk could persuade and satisfy the conscience—and another side, the merely similar, merely plausible, and uncertain. Probability was expanding from the provable based on “likeliness” or “likeness” to the more modern concept involving expectation and statistical frequencies which came to dominate probabilistic thinking by the end of the seventeenth century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Anonymous, The Arraignment and Conviction of Sir Walter Rawleigh, at the Kings Bench-Barre at Westminster (London, 1648), 15.

  2. 2.

    For a discussion of the Edwardian treason statutes, see John G. Bellamy, Law and Society in Late Medieval and Tudor England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 42.

  3. 3.

    Anonymous, Rawleigh, 16–17 (emphasis added).

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 18.

  5. 5.

    Anonymous, Rawleigh, 20.

  6. 6.

    William Cobbett and Thomas Howell, eds., Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, 4 vols (London: R. Bagshaw, 1809–1820), vol. 2. 26; Anonymous, Rawleigh, 20.

  7. 7.

    “Presumptions,” not suspicions and inferences, in the State Trials version (vol. 2, 25). Anonymous, Rawleigh, 21.

  8. 8.

    State Trials, vol. 1, 1053–1055 (emphasis added).

  9. 9.

    Anonymous, The Lives, Apprehensions, Arraignments, and Executions, of the 19 Late Pyrates (London, 1609), 61.

  10. 10.

    Thomas Andrew Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 26–27.

  11. 11.

    Barbara Shapiro, “Beyond Reasonable Doubt” and “Probable Cause:” Historical Perspectives on the Anglo-American Law of Evidence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 4.

  12. 12.

    Shapiro, “Beyond Reasonable Doubt,” 205.

  13. 13.

    Edward Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1628), sec. 1, 6b.

  14. 14.

    Edward Coke, The Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1642), 384. This work was published after Coke’s death in 1634.

  15. 15.

    Edward Coke, The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1669), 29.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 232 (emphasis added).

  17. 17.

    Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning,” in The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 222. Francis Bacon, “Novum Organon,” in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. Ellis and D.N. Heath (London, 1879), vol. 1, 151.

  18. 18.

    Bacon, “Advancement,” 291.

  19. 19.

    “Places” refers to “commonplaces.” Bacon, “Advancement,” 223 (emphasis added).

  20. 20.

    Cobbett and Howells, State Trials, vol. 1, 1054.

  21. 21.

    William Allen, A True Report of the Late Apprehension and Imprisonment of John Nichols Minister at Roan (London, 1583), 12, 29 and 30.

  22. 22.

    Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 229 and 6.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 229.

  24. 24.

    J. H. Baker, ed., The Reports of Sir John Spelman (London, 1978), vol. 2, 112.

  25. 25.

    Green, Verdict, 27.

  26. 26.

    Sir Thomas More, The debellacyon of Salem and Bizance (London, 1533), xc.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., xcii.

  28. 28.

    Jeremiah Dyke, The Burning Bush Not Consumed (London, 1627); Thomas Morton, A Full Satisfaction Concerning a Double Romish Iniquitie (London, 1606); Allen, John Nichols, 6; Humfrey Barwick, A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and Effect of all Manuall Weapons of Fire (London, 1592).

  29. 29.

    John Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 80.

  30. 30.

    Steve Sheppard, “The Metamorphoses of Reasonable Doubt: How Changes in the Burden of Proof Have Weakened the Presumption of Innocence,” Notre Dame Law Review 78 (2003), 1174–1175.

  31. 31.

    Bacon, “Advancement,” 147.

  32. 32.

    In rendering a partial verdict, jurors would take it upon themselves to convict the defendant on a lesser charge—one with which the defendant was not formally charged, but that he necessarily must have committed in the commission of the more serious charge, as where a jury convicts an accused thief only of trespassing, or convicts him only of petty theft rather than grand theft. The accused thus escaped the death penalty.

  33. 33.

    Cobbett, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 2, 970 (emphasis added).

  34. 34.

    Henry Goodcole, London’s Cry: Ascended to God, and Entred into the Hearts, and Eares of Men for Revenge of Bloodshedders, Burglaiers, and Vagabonds (London, 1619): “The Manner of the Courts [sic] Proceedings” (emphasis added).

  35. 35.

    Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), 92 (emphasis added).

  36. 36.

    Henry Cockeram, The English Dictionarie: Or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words (1623), s.v. “Probabilitie.”

  37. 37.

    Ibid.

  38. 38.

    Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), vol. 2, 4.2, 237.

  39. 39.

    The post-Baconian generation was able to move on to more probabilistic ground because it did not need to oppose skepticism flatly; by then, skepticism was losing ground. See Shapiro, Probability, 267–268.

  40. 40.

    John Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 205–206.

  41. 41.

    Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63.

  42. 42.

    Cynthia B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 7.

  43. 43.

    See Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law & Mimesis in Shakespeare & Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  44. 44.

    Ben Jonson, Volpone, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962) (emphasis added).

  45. 45.

    Alvin B. Kernan, introduction to Volpone, 150, note 9.

  46. 46.

    Ibid.

  47. 47.

    King James I, A Proclamation for Jurors (London, 1607) (emphasis added).

  48. 48.

    Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 376–377.

  49. 49.

    J. L. Heilbron (ed.), “Probability and Chance,” The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 677–678.

  50. 50.

    Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 230.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Davis, CA, USA

    Lisa Klotz

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  1. Lisa Klotz
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Correspondence to Lisa Klotz .

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  1. Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

    James A.T. Lancaster

  2. Department of History, University of Prince Edward Island, Charlottetown, PE, Canada

    Richard Raiswell

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Klotz, L. (2018). Legal Proof and Probability in Early Modern England. In: Lancaster, J., Raiswell, R. (eds) Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 225. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91869-3_2

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