The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward's `Laws' in Early Modern Political Thought.

The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward's `Laws' in Early Modern Political Thought. By JANELLE GREENBERG (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2001; pp. 343. 45 [pounds sterling]).

THE pre-eminent figures of seventeenth-century English political thought argued from the natural rights of all humanity and not from the historical rights of Englishmen. In Hobbes's Leviathan and Locke's Two Treatises there is no conceptual space for Saxon liberties, immemorial parliaments, and the unimpeachable common law. Consequently, historians tended to overlook ideas about the Ancient Constitution, which in fact filled the political treatises of that era. With the exception of books like D. C. Douglas's English Scholars and Samuel Kliger's The Goths in England, they were not much noticed until John Pocock's path-breaking book of 1957, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Janelle Greenberg has done more than most to flesh out Pocock's insights, and she does so abundantly in her new …