ABSTRACT
Economic historians nowadays do not generally assign a leading role to legislation or other declarations of economic policy.
That is not to argue the naive view that Tudor men and women can be judged only on their own terms. Disciplines like sociology and anthropology can be legitimately used to interpret their behaviour. Economics can emphasise profit and economic exploitation more than contemporaries did - though the tracts
The rule of law was fundamental to the thought of the age, and to the way men acted and behaved. Yet the phrase suggests a limited meaning to what was then an all-embracing concept. Central government did not clearly distinguish between its judicial and administrative functions; parliament and Privy Council could be quite correctly viewed as courts as well as executive and legislative institutions; justices of the peace in the localities were both administrative officers and law enforcers. And the law they administered and enforced had in turn to conform to natural and divine law as part of the cosmic scheme of order.
