9 - Assizes and politics

Summary

The twelve red coats in Westminster Hall are able to do more mischief to the nation than as many thousands in the field.

Attributed to Sir Matthew Hale by John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (1771–3), 1, 153.

The task of integrating the judiciary into the political scene during one hundred and fifty of the most complex and formative years of our history is immense. Anyone attempting to correlate the legal and political history of the period is faced with an uneven mass of fragmentary and dissociated information, much of which has to be set against a somewhat conjectural political background.

In the case of assizes, particularly in the earlier period, the problem is exceptionally acute. As with their more routine functions, circuit judges in their political capacity were concerned with essentially local interests, a mosaic of influence and faction in which even the judges became confused, and about which little or nothing is known. Available evidence seldom tells the full story of a particular episode, and hence any estimate of the extent of its political overtones is, at best, tentative.

A full-scale treatment of the judiciary clearly transcends the limits of a single chapter. It is therefore possible to do little more than consider thematically the main areas of judicial involvement as reflected in the conduct of assizes during these years. For the sake of convenience, the following account has been divided into three sections, identified by what appears to have been the dominant concern of the assize judges during the years comprised in each section; a fourth section deals with the Civil Wars and Interregnum.