ABSTRACT
In early modern England, not only future-oriented Puritan Salvationists criticised the common law.1Scholar-professors of civil and canon law at Oxford and Cambridge looked down on the clientelism and narrow craft of the common-law professionals in the Inns of Court and the courts of law, claiming for their own learned law a logical coherence and a jurisprudential certainty that eluded the commoners.2 Searching to disinter the elements of a critical tradition within English law, Peter Goodrich (1992, 1994) calls up lost memories of these civilians and canonists who castigated common law for its formalist excess, feigned antiquity, unreformed archaism, foreign language, and isolation from the continental traditions of historical, philological and philosophical scholarship. Citing Cowell’s (1583) description of the common law as ‘a dark and melancholy science’, Goodrich (1992:204) appeals to a ‘revised intellectual history of common law which placed the Anglican tradition within a continental context’ and which could ground the English law in a coherent philosophical reason or a systematic theory.
