ABSTRACT
The early-modern period witnessed a series of important shifts in English law away from medieval structures and customs and towards a putatively modern form of legality. With the rise of the modern nation-state came a concomitant desire for a centrally administered legal system that guaranteed the normative homogeneity of political space. It was the common law that emerged as the dominant legal force, supplanting or subsuming the plurality of jurisdictions that typified the medieval era. The common law was common to all within England and was a key instrument in consolidating the power of a newly centralised political authority. The early champions and apologists for this change to the nation’s legal orderings – Coke, Plowden, Hale and, later, Blackstone – underpinned the common law’s supremacy by reference to its ancient heritage, supposedly stretching to a time before not only the Norman Conquest but also the Roman invasion of Britain in the first century AD. This legal myth-making, as Peter Goodrich rightly points out, is a work of ‘common law theology’ (Goodrich, 1992: 205). By endowing the law with divine status, early-modern thinkers sought to guarantee the ‘infallibility and unquestionable authority of an indigenous English law’ (Goodrich, 1992: 205).
