ABSTRACT
As we argued in the last chapter, law was a cultural and ideological force so widely diffused in English society as to inform the notions and actions of the population at large. It would be idle, however, to deny that the law was more obviously an embodiment of the ideas and aspirations of the groups which ruled that population. Law was a means of expressing power. Statutes were made in Parliament, theoretically the representative of the people as a whole, in fact essentially the representative of the landed orders: the peers who sat in the House of Lords, and the gentry who sat in the Commons. These statutes were, for the most part, administered and enforced by the gentry acting as justices in the countryside, or by men of urban wealth in the towns. Moreover, the men of property did not wield power only through the whipping post, the house of correction and the gallows: they also controlled what would in modern parlance be described as the media, and hence were able to rein-force their economic and political power with an ideological one. Most strikingly, apart from the years 1640–60, they had at their disposal a state church which not only preached the virtues of obedience, but which also attempted to enforce religious conformity and conformity to Christian standards of behaviour through its courts. Superficially, therefore, the forces of authority, and the upper strata of society, would seem to have had overwhelmingly powerful resources in what some historians might portray as their struggle to assert their hegemony under the guise of maintaining law and order. The problem is to ascertain how far this superficial impression is a correct one.
