Abstract
The language of the law has always been rich in metaphor, and nowhere more so than in the seventeenth century.1 Law was invariably, if not quite originally, described as a map, a monument, a “darke and melancholy” “ancient palace,”2 a ship (according to Francis Bacon), a Janus (John Selden’s description of the common law), or, in echo of Virgil, a cypress “among the pliant shrubs.”3 Coke’s own motto as serjeant-at-law was Lex Est Tutissima Cassis, or Law is the Safest Helmet—an image that reflected a defensive and protective rather than an aggressive approach to the law’s borders.4 Borrowing from the organic model of the body politic, early seventeenth-century writers such as Nicholas Fuller could describe the laws of a realm in Fortescuean terms as the sinews of a body, just as John Davies likened a nation’s laws to the body’s organs.5 Like reason, honor, or love, law was also said to be indelibly inscribed in the heart, an image that extended back to biblical descriptions of Yahweh stating in the book of Jeremiah that “I will put my law within [the children of Israel], and I will write it upon their hearts.”6 Even Hobbes, ostensibly resistant to metaphor,7 would describe the law of nature, echoing Psalm 36.31, as “written in every man’s heart.”8
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Notes
For recent work on the role of metaphor in the law, see, for example, Peter Brook, “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric,” Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven, 1996), 14-23; Yon Maley, “The Language of the Law,” in Language and the Law, ed. John Gibbons (London, 1994), 11-50; Bernard J. Hibbitts, “Making Sense of Metaphor: Visuality, Aurality, and the Reconfiguration of American Legal Discourse,” Cardozo Law Review 229 (1994); Milner S. Ball, Lying Down Together: Law, Metaphor and Theology (1985), 23-27; Haig Bosmajian, Metaphor and Reason in Judicial Opinions (1992); James E. Murray, “Understanding Law as Metaphor,” Journal of Legal Education 34 (1984), 714
Thomas Ross, “Metaphor and Paradox,” Georgia Law Review 23 (1989), 1053, 1055–1063.
See, for example, James Boyd White, Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: WI, 1989), 67.
See, for example, Peter Lake and Michael Questier, “Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 153 (November 1996), 64-107; J. A. Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-Century England.” Past and Present 107 (1986), 144–167
Molly Smith, “The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in the Spanish Tragedy,” Studies in English Literature 32 (1992), 219–232
Randall McGowen, “The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England,” The Journal of Modern History 59 (1987), 651–679.
Curt Breight, “‘Treason Doth Never Prosper’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Treason,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 3.
Coke, 7 Reports, fol. 10a; see also Polly J. Price, “Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship” in Calvin’s Case, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 9 (1997), 73–145.
Conrad Russell, “The Theory of Treason in the Trial of Strafford,” English Historical Review 80 (1965), 33–34.
William Palmer, “Oliver St. John and the Legal Language of Revolution in England: 1640–1642,” The Historian 51 (2007), 276.
Jonathan K. van Patten, “Magic, Prophecy, and the Law of Treason in Reformation England,” The American Journal of Legal History 27 (1983), 9.
See, for example, the case of Sir Francis Windebank, Charles’ Secretary of State, in State Trials, 4: 42.
Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637-1642 (Oxford, 1991), 286. See also the case against Manwaring, who was charged with “set[ting] division between the head and the members, and between the members themselves.” See Thomas B. Howell, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and other Crimes and Misdemeanours (London, 1809–1826), 2: 336–337, 2: 156.
See Nathaniel Fiennes, “If It be Treason to Kill the Governor, Then Sure’ Tis Treason to Kill the Government,” Verney’s Notes of the Long Parliament, Camden Society, 1st ser., xxi (1845), ed. Bruce, 54. See also Robert Berkeley’s statement that sedition, “severs the people from the king is treason,” in State Trials, ed. T. B. Howell (21 vols., London, 1836), 3: 257–258 and 246-229.
Jean Bodin, Six Bookes of the Commonweale, trans. Richard Knolles and ed. Kenneth D. McRae (Cambridge, MA, 1962), book I, 159, 162. See also David Parker, “Law, Society and the State in the Thought of Jean Bodin,” History of Political Thought 2 (1981), 252–285
George L. Mosse, “The Influence ofJean Bodin’s République on English Political Thought,” Medievalia et Humanistica 5 (1948), 73–83.
See Palmer, “Oliver St. John” and the Legal Language of Revolution in England, 1640–1642,” The Historian 57 (1989), 273.
W. R. Stacy, “Matter of Fact, Matter of Law, and the Attainder of the Earl of Strafford,” American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985), 343–344.
Goodrich, Reading the Law, 131; and Languages of Law, 83; Donald Kelley, “English Law and the Renaissance,” Past and Present 65 (1974), 37.
See Coke, Reports, 6: 282; see also John Underwood Lewis, “Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634): His Theory of ‘Artificial Reason’ as a Context for Modern Basic Legal Theory,” in Law Quarterly Review 84 (1968), 330–342.
Tuck, 145, 153; see also Alan Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale, 1609–1676: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 1995), 30, 32.
Alan Cromartie, “The Constitutionalist Revolution: The Transformation of Political Culture in Early Stuart England,” Past and Present 163 (1999), 81.
State Trials, ed. Howell, 7: 13; see also Barbara Donagan, “Atrocity, War Crime and Treason in the English Civil War,” The American Historical Review 99 (1994), 1162.
John Pym, “The Speech or Declaration of John Pym,” Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (1721), 8: 661–671.
Oliver St John, An Argument of Law Concerning the Bill of Attainder of High Treason of Thomas, Earle of Strafford, Thomason Tracts, E 208(7), 71–72.
Marchamont Nedham, “A Short History of the English Rebellion (1661),” in The Harleian Miscellany: A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Entertaining Pamphlets and Tracts, 10 vols. (London, 1808–1813), 2: 528.
Adele Hast, “State Treason Trials during the Puritan Revolution, 1640–1660,” The Historical Journal 15 (1972), 37–53.
Edward Sexby [William Allen], Killing, No Murder (London, 1659), 3. See also Robert Zaller, “The Figure of the Tyrant in English Revolutionary Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54 (1993), 585–610
David C. Rappaport, “Messianic Sanctions for Terror,” Comparative Politics 20 (1988), 195–213
David George, “Distinguishing Classical Tyrannicide from Modern Terror,” The Review of Politics 50 (1988), 390–419.
James Holstun, “Ehud’s Dagger: Patronage, Tyrannicide, and ‘Killing No Murder,’” Cultural Critique 22 (Autumn, 1992), 99–142.
George Fox, The Works of George Fox (Cambridge, MA, 1831), 4: 30.
Curt Breight, “‘Treason doth never Prosper’: ‘The Tempest’ and the Discourse of Treason,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 2.
Molly Smith, “the Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle,” in The Spanish Tragedy, Studies in English Literature 32 (1992), 218.
Randall McGowen, “The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Modern History 59 (1987), 654–656.
See Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988), 15; see also Molly Easo Smith, “Spectacles of Torment in Titus Andronicus,” SEL 36 (1996), 315–331.
Christopher Hippert, The Roots of Evil. A Social History of Crime and Punishment, (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1963).
Zvi Jagendorf, “Coriolanus: Body Politic and Private Parts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41 (1990), 466–467.
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© 2009 Sarah Covington
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Covington, S. (2009). Law’s Breakages. In: Wounds, Flesh, And Metaphor In Seventeenth-Century England. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101098_3
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