William Lambarde, Elizabethan Law Reform, and Early Stuart Politics

1995 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilfrid Prest
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Tower Of London ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Court Of Chancery ◽  
Point Of Departure

William Lambarde (1536–1601) has been much celebrated, and cited, by historians of Tudor England. Besides compiling what is generally recognized as the earliest county history (A Perambulation of Kent, completed in 1570; first published in 1576) and a pioneering edition of Anglo-Saxon laws and customs (Archaionomia, 1568), Lambarde's famous manual on the duties, powers, and responsibilities of justices of the peace (Eirenarcha, 1581) “gives an account, which is both complete and systematic, of the organization of the local government … as it stood at the end of the sixteenth century.” Although his abilities and achievements received only a modest measure of contemporary recognition, toward the end of his life Lambarde successively acquired the posts of Deputy in the Alienations Office (1589), Master in Chancery Extraordinary (1592), Master in Chancery and Deputy Keeper of the Rolls (1597), and Keeper of Records in the Tower of London (1601). He had been associated to the bench of Lincoln's Inn in 1579 (having, as the Black Book citation put it, “deserved universallie well of his comon wealth and contrie”); these promotions induced the ruling Council to make him a full bencher, “being one of Her Majesties Masters of hir Court of Chancery and of great reading, learning and experience.”In depicting the conscientious Elizabethan J.P. as burdened by “stacks of statutes,” Lambarde coined a phrase which has indeed “burrowed its way into most historical textbooks.” Besides numerous articles, modern scholarly interest in the man and his works has generated two biographies (published in 1965 and 1973), while the point of departure for John Howes Gleason's institutional-cumprosopographical account of local government under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts was Lambarde's own record of his activities as a Kentish justice in the 1580s.

England's Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce and Policy, 1490–1690. By David Loades. London: Longman, 2000. Pp. xi, 277. $17.80, paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1106-1107
Author(s):  
G. V. Scammell
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Overseas Expansion ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Maritime Empire

To the vast and burgeoning literature on the rise, fall, and consequences of European empire-building, David Loades, a distinguished historian of Tudor England, adds this brief and stimulating book on the origins and course of the country's overseas expansion in the two centuries after 1490. He is not concerned with models or with the analysis of global balances of power. Taking a more modest perspective, he argues that between 1490 and 1690 England changed from being the decayed remnant of a once-formidable expansionist power on the Continent to a nascent oceanic and imperial state. By the mid-1500s, he claims, the foundations of the country's subsequent maritime and colonial achievements were already in place. He identifies the vital elements as the creation of a standing specialist fighting navy; the development, from the mid-sixteenth century, of an interest in long-distance voyages and trading ventures, sustained under Elizabeth I by an “enterprise partnership” between the queen and some of her subjects; and the emergence, in the years of the Commonwealth and the Cromwellian Republic, of the navy as an instrument of state rather than dynastic ambition. However, as the argument unfolds he admits the importance of other factors, not least the pursuit of profit and the desire of some of England's populace to escape from religious or political regimes they found intolerable.

The Lost Works of Thomas Becon

The Library ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-497
Author(s):  
Jonathan Reimer
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Valuable Contribution ◽  
Early Publication ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Literary Output

Abstract This article attributes four lost works to the literary corpus of the English clergyman and bestselling Tudor devotional author Thomas Becon (1512–1567): The Shelde of Saluacion, An Heauenly Acte, Christen Prayers and Godly Meditacions, and The Resurreccion of the Masse. It ascribes these texts to Becon in light of three types of corroborating evidence: contemporary attribution, parallels of content, and early publication history. These four lost works not only furnish a fuller picture of his literary output, but also provide new insights into his career, rhetoric, and theology. As Becon was the most popular evangelical devotional author writing in English during the sixteenth century, this analysis of his hitherto unattributed books makes a valuable contribution to the bibliography of Tudor England, especially during the transformative years of the Henrician, Edwardine, Marian, and Elizabethan Reformations.

A Venetian Secretary in England: an unpublished diplomatic report in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice1

1997 ◽  
Vol 70 (172) ◽  
pp. 170-181
Author(s):  
Robert Barrington
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Political Analysis

Abstract Venetian diplomatic relazioni are a familiar source to sixteenth‐century historians. They often present a detailed philosophical and political analysis of the courts to which Venice had sent ambassadors. At their best, they are sophisticated humanist commentaries on the state. Relazioni from Tudor England were no exception. Unfortunately, the politically turbulent years of the early Reformation are marked by a break in the Venetian relazioni coinciding with the period when diplomatic representation was suspended. However, a newly‐discovered document reproduced here, from the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, is almost certainly a secretary's report which fills this chronological gap. The document is formal in tone and follows the structure of a model relazione. The lengthy descriptions of England's history and geography and references to contemporary events suggest a date of c. 1540.

The Impact of the Reformation

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Martin Pugh
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Long Term Effect ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
European Diplomacy ◽  
Francis I

This chapter focuses on the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Following Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1531, the English Reformation led Britain into a protracted struggle with the two great Catholic powers, Spain and France, for the next 300 years. The long-term effect was to define Britain as the leading Protestant power; but more immediately, it posed a far greater threat to England than Islam, and effectively destroyed the rationale for crusading activities. In this situation, the Islamic empires actually became a valuable balancing factor in European diplomacy. Henry's readiness to deal with the Muslim powers was far from eccentric during the sixteenth century. Both King Francis I of France and Queen Elizabeth I of England took the policy of collaboration much further.

The Structures of Politics in Early Tudor England

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 59-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Trench Warfare

Something of the atmosphere of trench warfare, with its immobility and its desperation, has overcome the historiography of early Tudor politics. The most spectacular impasse concerns the fall of Anne Boleyn. Three scholars have recently set out and defended against one another divergent explanations of her fall. Professor Ives and Professor Warnicke can agree that Dr Bernard is wrong: Anne cannot possibly have been destroyed by a masterful and jealous king who may reasonably have believed her guilty of multiple adultery as charged. Dr Bernard and Professor Ives can agree that Professor Warnicke is wrong: Anne's fall cannot be attributed to her miscarriage of a deformed foetus, awakening the king's fears of witchcraft and its sixteenth-century stablemates, sodomy and incest. Professor Warnicke and Dr Bernard can agree that Professor Ives is wrong: Anne cannot have been ousted by a factional plot at court, coordinated by Thomas Cromwell and cynically using fabricated charges of adultery to hustle the king into destroying the queen and her partisans at a single blow.

The Chapel Royal (1543–85), II

Tallis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 57-72
Author(s):  
Kerry McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Daily Routine ◽  
Tower Of London ◽  
River Thames ◽  
Royal Household

The life of a sixteenth-century Chapel Royal musician was highly itinerant. Tudor kings and queens did not live in one place; they moved freely among their many residences, bringing their musicians and other staff with them. The most important royal residences in Tallis’s day were located along the River Thames within easy reach of London. This chapter is a tour of these Tudor palaces and their chapels, with notes on the daily routine and working conditions of the Chapel Royal singers. Some of the chapels (at Hampton Court Palace, St. James’s Palace, and the Tower of London) are still intact to some degree. Others (at Windsor, Richmond, Whitehall, and Greenwich) have been destroyed but are documented in sixteenth-century descriptions and pictures. The journey ends in Greenwich, where Tallis lived when he was not traveling with the royal household.

Ven. Robert Sutton of Stafford a Note on his Family and Early Life

1953 ◽  
Vol 2 (02) ◽  
pp. 150-166
Author(s):  
D.M. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Present Note ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Other ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Catholic Faith

Robert Sutton is a name that occurs quite often in sixteenth century records. It was borne by two of the English martyrs under Elizabeth I, the only two, among the three hundred and sixty martyrs at present officially listed, to bear identical names. One of these was a layman, a school-master, hanged at Clerkenwell in October 1588 for being reconciled to the Catholic faith (1). The other was a secular priest hanged, drawn and quartered at Stafford a year earlier (2). The present note concerns the priest, but since further contemporaries of these two martyrs also had the same name, others, too, will be mentioned in the course of investigating the early years of the Ven. Robert Sutton, the priest martyr of 1587.

scholarly journals ‘The inordinate excess in apparel’: Sumptuary Legislation in Tudor England

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leah Kirtio
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Moral Regulation ◽  
Luxury Goods ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Sumptuary Legislation

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of sumptuary legislation in sixteenth century England. It argues that the aims of sumptuary legislation were threefold: that legislators sought to maintain the stability of the common weal through social regulation, moral regulation through the moralization of luxury goods, and to regulate England’s economy, by prohibiting foreign trade in luxury goods, in order to stimulate the home economy and the burgeoning wool and stocking trade.

The making of Tudor England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Gunn
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Mobile Agents ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Self Help

The new men’s role in Henry VII’s regime must be set amid the contribution made to his reign by other royal councillors and servants, bishops, lesser clerics, peers, and courtiers. Yet their efforts did much to give his government its distinctive flavour. Their careers as upwardly mobile agents of royal power were not unprecedented, but were notable in their impact, paralleled those of their contemporaries in other European polities, and foreshadowed those of later sixteenth-century statesmen. Their importance was evident to those interpreting Henry’s reign in the decades that followed, into the generations of Holinshed and Stow, Shakespeare, and Bacon. Critical contemporaries were right that they mixed self-help liberally with public service, but they were central to the making of Tudor England.

scholarly journals Erasmus and the Politics of Translation in Tudor England

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 132-145
Author(s):  
Lucy Wooding
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Desiderius Erasmus ◽  
The Political ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
Tudor England ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Significant Figure ◽  
Original Intention

Desiderius Erasmus was a significant figure in early sixteenth-century England, and many of his works were translated into English during the reign of Henry VIII. In the process of translation the original intention of these works was subverted as Erasmus's reputation was appropriated by his translators and their patrons for their own purposes. His works were recast in English form to serve a variety of different agendas, from those of Henrician conservatives to Protestants pushing for more radical religious reform. This article looks at some of these translations, showing how they illustrate the variations in religious attitudes during these volatile years and the competing claims for validation. In particular, Erasmus's pronouncements on the importance of Scripture translation were annexed and deployed in the debate over the English Bible, demonstrating how his views about translation were in themselves translated to reflect the political and religious needs of the English situation.

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