In a political system based on monarchy it is misleading to equate governance (the active and legitimate exercise of social control) with politics (the public debate surrounding that practice), for the basis of power and authority in late medieval England lay overwhelmingly in the personal rule of the king, and ‘public debate’ over how he did so was very rarely conducted in the open, though, as we shall see, it certainly could – and did – occur. For most of the time, however, there was very little ‘politics’ but an awful lot of ‘governance’. The basis of a king’s right to exercise governance over his subjects lay in the theoretically unimpeachable notion that he had been appointed by God to protect and advance the common interest of the kingdom.

If Edward I had died in the course of his conquest of Wales in the early 1280s, his successor would not have been the notorious Edward II, but King Alfonso I, born at Bayonne in 1273, and named after his godfather, the queen’s brother and king of Castile. In fact, Alfonso was to die a child in 1284, just as Edward’s first two sons had done, but the details of his life are a reminder that English kingship was not just – or even, at times, very – English. The kings of England, descended from Normans and Angevins in the male line, wished to be leading figures on the European stage, and they jealously defended lands, rights and connections across the continent, as well as in these islands.

Crown finance in late medieval England had a lot of moving parts, not all of which fitted together. This chapter looks initially at income and expenditure, before examining the ways in which the financial system was managed, massaged and manipulated. The many moving parts which ultimately contributed to the evolution of a public financial system, forged in an often charged but fundamentally stable partnership with parliament through a period of protracted war, were one of the keystones of the expanding political society – king, nobility, gentry, merchants – which lay at the heart of the late medieval and early modern English state. The formative century in this process was circa 1260 to 1360 but, despite the political upheavals, ever more frequent financial crises and declining taxation revenues of the century which followed, it proved strong enough to withstand the challenges.

This chapter examines the relationship between the king and his ‘ordinary’ subjects and asks whether such a thing as ‘public opinion’ evolved over the period to play a role in politics. For medieval historians, ‘the public’ used to be synonymous with the nobility and gentry. They were the section of the population that had some formal role in governance and had time outside of the demands of labour to devote to political questions. However, recent scholarship has emphasised that most if not all people in later medieval England had access to texts, could hear them read aloud and discuss their contents. This has led to a reappraisal of the later medieval public, towards an expansionist view that includes people below the ranks of the gentry as politically aware and engaged.

The Statute of Uses enacted radical reform which can still be felt across the common law world. It was from exceptions to the statute’s execution of uses to perform last wills that the modern trust emerged. Our understanding of the passage of the statute has been shaped by the survival of several draft bills and ancillary documents. It has been argued that a draft bill introduced in 1529 was rejected by the Commons in March 1532. This in turn inspired the landmark litigation in Dacre’s Case (1533–35), which paved the way for the subsequent enactment of the Statute of Uses. This chapter challenges that orthodox position by demonstrating that there were in fact three early drafts which were considered. It then considers what this tells us about the role of the crown, parliament and the courts during this pivotal period in our legal history.

The overview of the book’s argument provides a framework for understanding the relationship between fiscal policy, sovereignty, and Renaissance English literature. It examines the challenges of sovereign authority in the period, especially the fiscal responsibilities of rulers and the potential for political instability due to taxation. The chapter draws parallels between historical and contemporary debates on taxation, emphasizing fiscal policy’s role in shaping collective security and wellbeing. It delves into the complexities of funding sovereignty in early modern England, highlighting the tension between necessary taxation and perceived fiscal aggression. The chapter introduces the idea of a "fiscal security dilemma," in which efforts to ensure security through taxation can paradoxically create insecurity and concludes with an overview of the book’s chapters and the variety of ways literary writers engaged with the struggle over fiscal policy as central to defining political community and governance in Renaissance England.

This chapter explores the idea of opposition. One may make known one’s opposition to specific measures and one may make known one’s opposition to those who hold the office of government. While opposition to those who rule may flourish only in constitutional arrangements that contemplate changes in government, the freedom to make known opposition to measures may obtain and flourish even absent such arrangements. These two different modalities of opposition – to measures and to governments – draw on a reciprocal understanding that those who oppose and those who rule are both committed to the public good. Depending on the design of its system of government, a constitution may enable or empower opposition, with the parliamentary form of government differing in important respects from the presidential. Some constitutional arrangements and proposals award to opposition members in legislatures and elsewhere some degree of authority in exercising the office of government. Whatever the merits of such coalition or consensus arrangements and proposals, they change the function of opposition, for when those who oppose begin to govern, a version of the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guardians) arises: who stands in opposition to the opposition?

In this chapter, we argue that while it has often been suggested that utility models are a product of late nineteenth-century German thinking and that they are foreign to the United Kingdom, utility model protection was first introduced to the United Kingdom in the Utility Designs Act 1843. As such, it is clear that utility model protection has a long established (albeit somewhat tarnished) pedigree in British law and that utility model protection came into force in the United Kingdom some fifty years before its German counterpart. In this chapter we highlight the key features of the Utility Designs Act 1843, the way the Act was received, and speculate on the reasons why the Act was forgotten

Arriving at the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737, Johnson soon plunged into workaday journalism which absorbed a great deal of energy for little pay. After an unsuccessful attempt to leave, he settled to his task, including the labour of composing parliamentary reports without entering Parliament itself. He began to develop an essayistic style, and to establish a certain attitude towards journalism itself: wary of sensationalism and propaganda, but respectful of the functions of the ‘humble author’ in providing harmless entertainment and useful knowledge. This was good preparation for the Rambler series, sometimes seen as the pinnacle of Johnson’s work: an ironic, self-deprecating set of twice-weekly essays, which amounts to a sustained study of human nature and human existence. In his later Idler essays, Johnson introduced a lighter touch, and in his articles for the Literary Magazine, he gave a Johnsonian treatment to such topics as beekeeping and electricity.

This chapter introduces the notion of an ad libitum or at-will use of the constitutional concept of public order. The concept of public order fulfils an important role in the protection of minorities but also extends far beyond the interests of religious and ethnoreligious minorities. The Dutch prohibition of the full-face veil demonstrated a susceptibility of the concept of public order to social norms. Initially a flagship of Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam movement, the Cabinet in some ways successfully captured the topic and diminished the language of aggressive othering of Islam to issues of communication and a vague concept of living together. This could be understood against the backdrop of political gains made on the far-right across Europe, and the law perhaps contributed to an attempt at containing this threat of political gains from the far-right.

Hume’s ‘Of Eloquence’ – in which Hume implores English orators to imitate the sublime style of Demosthenes – has long puzzled readers, for two reasons. First, it is rare for Hume to present ancient examples as suitable for moderns to imitate, particularly where politics is concerned. Second, in the essay’s conclusion, Hume seems to backtrack by encouraging English speakers to give up on sublimity and introduce more order and method into their speeches instead, inviting the accusation of incoherence. In this chapter, I show how reading Hume’s essay through the lens of ancients and moderns is limiting and that a comparison between the political cultures of England and France was central to his analysis. For Hume, the lack of sublimity in Parliament was a specifically English problem with roots in the English national character. If the revival of classical eloquence that Hume desired looked unlikely to him, I argue, this was due less to the unsuitability of sublime speech to a modern society than to the peculiar place of Parliament in Britain’s mixed constitutional order. I also demonstrate that Hume’s closing call for more order and method in English speechmaking was consistent with his earlier endorsement of the sublime.

Farage also used ‘we’ to show that he identified with ‘the people’. The ideas underlying this phrase need to be understood in their historical context, since they vary depending on particular national histories, but all share a common ancestor in ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. British democracy needs to be traced back to British thinkers such as Buchanan, Hobbes and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This is relevant because the historical discourse surrounding the phrase ‘the people’ was central to the development of democracy, and is continuous with today’s challenges to it. The various notions of ‘the people’ were connected with the ‘sovereignty of the people’ and the ‘sovereignty of parliament’, the latter being expressly challenged by populist parties like UKIP, in favour of direct democracy, and the same trend was evident in the post-referendum governments. The expression ‘the common people’ played an important role in British political discourse. Its early meaning changed radically until it was replaced by ‘ordinary people’, which in the Brexiter demagoguery was equated with ‘the people’, in opposition to ‘the elite’.