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Unwritten Verities
In Unwritten Verities: The Making of England's Vernacular
Legal Culture, 1463-1549 , Sebastian Sobecki argues that the
commitment by English common law to an unwritten tradition, along
with its association with Lancastrian political ideas of consensual
government, generated a vernacular legal culture on the eve of the
Reformation that challenged the centralizing ambitions of Tudor
monarchs, the scriptural literalism of ardent Protestants, and the
Latinity of English humanists.
Sobecki identifies the widespread dissemination of legal books
and William Caxton's printing of the Statutes of Henry VII as
crucial events in the creation of a vernacular legal culture. He
reveals the impact of medieval concepts of language, governance,
and unwritten authority on such sixteenth-century humanists,
reformers, playwrights, and legal writers as John Rastell, Thomas
Elyot, Christopher St. German, Edmund Dudley, John Heywood, and
Thomas Starkey. Unwritten Verities argues that three
significant developments contributed to the emergence of a
vernacular legal culture in fifteenth-century England: medieval
literary theories of translation, a Lancastrian legacy of conciliar
government, and an adherence to unwritten tradition. This
vernacular legal culture, in turn, challenged the textual practices
of English humanism and the early Reformation in the following
century. Ultimately, the spread of vernacular law books found a
response in the popular rebellions of 1549, at the helm of which
often stood petitioners trained in legal writing.
Informed by new developments in medieval literature and early
modern social history, Unwritten Verities sheds new light
on law printing, John Fortescue's constitutional thought, ideas of
the commonwealth, and the role of French in medieval and Tudor
England.
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