ABSTRACT
In the 1790s, as Albert Goodwin notes, English radicals tended to argue their case in terms of 'ancestral rights', supposedly the prerogative of 'free-born Englishmen', as opposed to drawing upon the natural rights discourse of their French counterparts. The characterization of custom as a popular retention of rights, long submerged under successive encroachments of the Normans and their aristocratic inheritors, but never entirely eradicated, was a mainstay of constitutionalist debate in the eighteenth century, both among radicals and conservatives. Common law and its analogous relationship with common language is a recurring theme of works on language in the late eighteenth century, and the terms used to discuss such uncodified but ideologically powerful legislature recall the terms applied to the putative Anglo-Saxon inheritance so dear to reformists. But common law had a very important point of intersection with the popular culture of the late eighteenth century in that it was unwritten.
