The renaissance of English legal history

Abstract

John Baker’s “English Law and the Renaissance” is perhaps the most significant paper in English legal history to appear in the Cambridge Law Journal. In many ways it was a response to, and development from, F. W. Maitland’s Rede Lecture with the same title, published some 80 years previously. Baker’s paper marks a punctuation in his study of English law under the early Tudors, a subject which he has made his own, culminating in his magisterial sixth volume of The Oxford History of the Laws of England. In addition, it marked a major break with the earlier orthodoxy that English law in this period was fundamentally distinct from the law which was developing on the European continent. The present paper explores both of these themes.