Anglo-Romano Common Law on Natural Subjecthood, Lansdowne MS 486 ff. 142–143

Abstract

Together Cæsar and Cotton left an immense trove of English state papers on all matters of subjects. While Cæsar spent much of his lifetime as an officer of state, e.g., Master of the Rolls, they both devised innumerable works of great value. For instance, both he and Cotton expounded upon the issue of the post-nati and other arguments made in the conferences on the union with Scotland in Parliament. With their cessation in 1607, Cæsar undertook his most significant follow-up work: “That neither any General Statute nor Nativity only make a Man (whose Parents were Strangers) to be a Natural Subject in any Country.” Later duplicated by Cotton in Titus, F. IV., the intricacies of its two pages remained long-guarded in the private possession of such great men as Lords, Secretaries of State, and Prime Ministers. Only two centuries after Cæsar commenced its work did it come full circle to the British Museum—itself, ironically, formed from the seized library of Cotton. As for legal precedent, it is unique in that its broad historical scope predated the complexities of England's permanent royal colonies in America. During this period, every regnant—except for Charles I and James II—would assent unto major naturalization or alien statutes during their reign, all of which remained common law throughout England, the Empire, and America until, at the least, 1863.

This research note introduces the following:

1. (1) A comparison of the internal British Museum catalogs for the state papers of two interlinked seventeenth-century statesmen, which—only thanks to the Records Commissions ordered by King George IIIrd—were publicly printed in 1802 and 1819, respectively.

2. (2) The meticulously traced ownership and transference of two folios, initially held privately for an extended duration, at large with various statesmen and antiquaries, and subsequently bound with contemporaneous papers within a single volume of a multi-volume series housed in the Lansdowne Manuscripts of the British Library, formerly the said British Museum. Specifically, the focus is on that library's Lansdowne Manuscripts’ Papers of Sir Julius Cæsar, volume 486, ff. 142–143.

3. (3) An accurate reproduction of the said manuscript.

4. (4) The remaining two-thirds of the document comprise annotations to the original manuscript's quotations and references, with few detailed citations. Once the languages, editions, and invocated texts were determined and located, their relevant passages were facsimiled, expanded upon, transliterated, and, only then, translated. Rather than devising those annotations from any subsequent histories or annotations thereto, the sources used therein comprise the verbatim texts featured in those two folios, albeit sometimes after translation. Moreover, all of them were published prior to or concurrent with the drafting of the manuscript, and many of those stamped were so stamped with the very same “MUSEUM BRITANNICVM”—ironically, formed from one of their confiscated libraries, i.e., the Cottonian library.

5. (5) Two high-resolution photographs of the specified folios, within the said papers of the Right Honorable Julius Cæsar, Knight, Master of the Rolls, specifically in Volume 486 of the “Lansdowne Manuscripts,” as held by the Trustees of the British Library.

In essence, the text curtly examines the historical legalities of what distinguishes natural subjects from aliens or strangers—a point of many centuries-long captivations for monarchs, state officers, historians, and legal scholars alike. It explores what historically constituted a “natural subject” in Romanized Europe, as first succinctly articulated by Cæsar, and a comprehensive history of seemingly immutable, inheritable socio-legal norms foundational to—the comparatively modern—“citizenship.”

In England during the early reign of King James, this matter provoked a rigorous exploration of the legal criteria for subjecthood and the underlying historical methods by which one was determined to be along a spectrum from a natural subject to an alien stranger. However, most legal discourse centered upon the 1604, 1606, and 1607 parliamentary conferences on the union with Scotland. Nevertheless, the Houses of Parliaments’ timely coverage of this history—at the inception of imperial colonialism beyond the British Isles—provides contrast between the introspective Anglo-Romano there and the extrospective Anglo-American common law overseas. The bridge between these foci is unique in that the then-historical precedents elucidated what exact common laws on natural subjecthood would become inherited throughout the English then British Empire. Moreover, the rolls of Parliament used therein provide a domestic basis of what had defined English subjecthood before the precipice of royal colonies in English America. Consequently, this retrospectively oriented legal history dwells within an historical framework long since preserved in the United States—yet long since dead in England.

These legal processes directly impacted Cæsar from his birth year of 1588–89, as his Venetian father had only recently been granted denization “with the right to plead and be impleaded in all courts, buy, and sell lands and goods, etc. and to pay not other taxes, subsidies and customs than those which natives born in the realm are bound to pay.”ⁱ However, such an honored status had been earned as recompense for him having been the “Docter and Phisitian to Q[ueene] Eliz[abeth]” until ca. 1569.ⁱⁱ Furthermore, as his mother was native English but his father “Venetian by byrth,” the latter's establishment of his allegiance and obeisance to England, and a charter confirming the same, ensured that their descendants would be natural subjects.ⁱⁱⁱ Given this familial record, it is hardly surprising that Cæsar laboriously spent the period from ca. 1607 to 1625 writing the history of his own inherited legal status.

The annotations to this manuscript elaborate upon and interweave insights from European jurists concerning naturalization and denization, explore the disparities between the two procedures, and illustrate their implications for individuals seeking to obtain the rights and privileges of England. As Cæsar explains, naturalization was a more comprehensive process that endowed individuals with almost all the rights of natural-born subjects. In contrast, denization was a more limited form of citizenship, often conferred upon skilled foreigners or for diplomacy. As in Cæsar's father's case, that royal charter grant had conferred the equality of standing and further associated privileges. Both grants, in law, transformed such an alien stranger into a subject replete with benefits inherent to those who had been allegiant by birth.

Foremost, this introduction establishes a novel approach to modern legal history, albeit paradoxically grounded in texts four centuries old or more so. Integral to the great age of these texts, their annotations include diverse usages of Middle and Modern English, late twelfth- to early seventeenth-century Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Old, Middle, and Modern French. The methodology devised for such a transdisciplinary endeavor proceeds thusly: First, as the manuscript under examination is a product of its time, it contains a great many arcane and non-English phrases, which had to be sourced to then-contemporary editions to both ensure accuracy and avoid asynchrony. Second, the text surrounding these phrases was assessed for its potential to provide useful context, with expansions varying from a single sentence to multiple paragraphs, depending on its perceived utility. Third, as these texts are non-standard in many respects—even with near consistency of time and place of rigin—, meticulous attention was devoted to the accuracy of their facsimile, e.g., retaining the precise scribal notations made on the parliamentary rolls. Fourth, given the near absence of macrons in the Latin—save for the occasional ā—and similarly few accents in the French texts, it was deemed imperative to transliterate these facsimiles to determine accurate prepositions, tenses, and so on. Fifth, to ensure comprehension for an Anglophone readership, all the text not originally in English is translated into modern English with explicit preservation of both original punctuation placements and phrase lengths. With the statutes, each translation also preserved its unique word and line breaks for the benefit of non-specialist readers.

The dividends of this methodological approach are most apparent in one of the two official statute reference sources utilized in this work: the first volume of the “Statutes of the Realm,” which was compiled and edited by the said Records Commissions. The first two boards of which devoted a decade to a similar task—albeit Herculean in scale—of focusing on the English statutes up to A.D. 1376.^iv Despite being derived, as stipulated on each volume's title page, “from original records and authentic manuscripts,” this official compilation does not escape the imperfections inherent to its era. The most recurrent instance of this is the erroneous usage of the semicolon in the middle of the fourteenth century rather than the temporally accurate colon or comma. Although this might appear minor, such basic punctuation and more were handled far too loosely in the initial volumes of the nine-volume series of ten books. However, this criticism started to become moot from the late fifteenth century, when, as bills, those statutes were written in English—albeit of some great variety. By this time, their primary language had transitioned from Law French—a recombination of Anglo-Norman and French—into a convoluted legal English, though devoid of the scribal shorthand of the Mediæval Latin thence carried over to the Anglo-Norman of the period. Consequently, discrepancies abound in those Records Commissions’ early works within the period between entirely Latin statutes, and the said English ones when such statutes were in an overlapping transition from Norman and Middle French into Middle English.

Though this linguistic transitional period in the statute law lasted for less than three centuries, their latter, official interpretations could have been less confounded. For instance, the early nineteenth-century Records Commissions tried to compromise in their interpretations, whether between common printings and manuscripts, preferring the English version with bilingual manuscripts, or applying standardization when the manuscript acts were themselves from bills made by many disparate authors’ hands. Albeit, precious little aided them in determining which was the “original” in the case of contemporary bilingual manuscripts. Furthermore, the grammatical idiosyncrasies of their time were further compounded by an aversion to or ignorance of previous centuries’ habits—e.g., a lack of commas or periods, the long/medial s, interchanges of “v” and “u,” “i” and “j,” and so on.

Even with a decade's work, the first two boards of those Records Commissions could not adequately honor the grammar and etymology of the statutes on the rolls during this transitional period; as a result, the relevance to the history of those laws remains yet undetermined due to such past insufficiencies. Notwithstanding this, only the remnants of their English “translations” of Law French should be referred to over those statutes’ respectively corresponding entries within the slightly earlier series, “Rotuli Parliamentorum; ut et Petitiones, et Placita in Parliamento.”

Remarkably, this late eighteenth-century series, though primarily in Law French, retained a far superior conveyance of English history, ironically, with a methodology of only showing what the original shows, even at the appearance of abjuring the English language. Even approaching A.D. 1800, Law French had already irrevocably deviated from its antecedents in orthographies, e.g., spelling, respect of gender, and so on, instead having recurrently matched various periods’ English pronunciations. As such, in practically deciphering the evolution of Law-French statutes, for instance, via transliteration into post-1990 Modern French, one must reprioritize the rules of continental French over Middle English therewithin. The key challenges in such transliteration have arisen inversely over the centuries: first, the avoidance in preference for asynchronous faux amis, especially those which have arisen from non-contemporary, more recent linguistic developments; second, the extinction of etymological branches, particularly literary ones, in which one would be bereft of all but archaisms.

The former, tireless efforts of the early Records Commissions established a high standard yet unsurpassed. Furthermore, given the destruction wrought by the Great Fire of 1834, the endeavors of all those commissioners across the multiple boards of the Records Commissions remain an enduringly invaluable contribution to the historiography of England. Specifically, their preservation via facsimile of so many of the Realm's statute manuscripts—some subsequently conflagrated and others water-damaged by being thrown out of a window into the Thames—has been critical in elucidating the direct impacts of English common law the world over both historical and contemporary.

Altogether, this work introduces what had been a relatively simple history of natural subjecthood until its creation. Unlike with the few and far between enactments beforehand, from 1610 (7 Jac. I. c. 2), every regnant or regnants—besides Charles I or James II—would regularly assent unto one to three major naturalization or alien bills in their entire reigns. Moreover, nearly all such acts would endure at common law throughout the Empire until the following repeal acts, namely, those assented unto in: 1863 (26 and 27 Vict. c. 125) for England, 1867 (30 and 31 Vict. c. 59), 1870 (33 and 34 Vict. c. 14), 1914 (Geo. V. c. 17), and 1948 (11 and 12 Geo. VI. c. 62).

Revised and clarified British Museum catalogs:

The timeline of creation and history of ownership for the ensuing two folios:

1. 1. The Right Honorable Sir Julius Cæsar, knight.^vii

   • ◦ Footnote 19's mention of “Guien” is last found within both the House of Commons’ and House of Lords’ journals on Sāturnī, 28° Mārtiī 1607, i.e., March 28th, 1607.

   • ◦ He commenced his writing of them—possibly in successive drafts—no sooner than his July 4th, 1607 entry into the House of Commons for Westminster or his swearing into His Majesties Most Honorable Privie Counsel on July 5th, 1607.

   • ◦ During his lifetime, the latest verbatim source for any of his Latin quotations was the 1624 biblical exegesis Isagoge Chronologica, which solely matched the unique substitutions of both a “j” in “eius” and “â” in “terrā alienā” within his manuscript.

   • ◦ He was Master of the Rolls from September 1st, 1614 to April 18th, 1636.

     • ■ A near-contemporaneous oath for the said office: “YOU shall sweare, That well and lawfully ye shall serve the King our Sovereigne Lord and his People, in the Office of Clerke or Master of the Rolls, to the which ye be callled; Yee shall not assent, nor procure the disinheritance, nor perpetuall damage of the King, to your power; nor fraud ye shall do, nor cause to be made wrongfully to any of his People, nor in any thing that toucheth the Seale; and lawfully yee conceale the things that toucheth the King, when ye shall be thereto required; And the counsell that ye shall give touching him ye shall not disclose; And if ye know any thing of the disinheritance or damage of the King, or fraud to be made upon anything that toucheth the keeping of the Seale, ye shall put your lawfull power that to redresse and amend; And if that ye cannot, ye shall advise the Chancellor or other which may that amend to your power. As God you helpe, and his Saints.”^viii

2. 2. Ownership at large

   • ◦ Ca. 1636 to 1690s.

3. 3. Lord John Somers, Baron Somers.

   • ◦ He held them sometime between also holding great offices of state from the 1690s and his April 26th, 1716 death; later, they remained in his estate ca. 1730.^ix

4. 4. Edward Umfreville.

   • ◦ Accessed them in a bound state in 1730, and made the following note in the top margin beginning Lansdowne MS, vol. 486:

     • ■ A Copy of a Book in the Cotton Library out of the Collection of Lord Somors marked “Tum Umfreville 1730 Titus F. 4. pārē prīmā.”

   • ◦ Later, however, “he was obliged to sell a considerable part of his library, including 257 manuscripts” ca. the February 13th, 1757–58.^x

     • ■ “Many of these manuscripts came into the Lansdowne collection and are now in the British Library.”^xi

5. 5. The Right Honorable, Sir Joseph Jekyll, knight.

   • ◦ Possessed them as Master of the Rolls between the July 13th, 1717 and his death on the August 19th, 1738; then, sold ca. February 26th, 1738–39.^xii

6. 6. Ownership at large.

   • ◦ Having been sold to an unknown buyer, they remained at large for nearly 20 years.

   • ◦ Auctioned at “St. Paul's Coffee-house in St. Paul's Church-yard” between December 14th and 16th, 1757.^xiii

7. 7. Thomas Birch, a trustee of the British Museum.^xiv

   • ◦ “Birch in a note at the head of the roll [i.e., Lansdowne MS 123 (ca. 1610)] says that it had belonged to Sir Julius Caesar, Master of the Rolls, at whose sale in 1757 he bought it (lot 7 in A catalogue of the manuscripts of Sir Julius Caesar, 14[th of] Dec[ember] 1757.”

   • ◦ “He left his library and manuscripts to the British Museum” ca. his death on the January 19th, 1766.

8. 8. The Right Honorable, William Petty, Earl of Shelburne & Marquis of Lansdowne.^xv

   • ◦ He held positions in state from the 1760s and many in the great offices of state during 1780s; sometime prior to his May 7th, 1805 death, he had come into possession of the said two folios as well as many other contemporary documents of Cæsar's.

   • ◦ “II. The correspondence and other papers of Sir Julius Caesar […] consisting of fifty volumes […] Purchased by the Trustees of the British Museum in 1807, pursuant to a vote of Parliament, from the representatives of William first Marquis of Lansdowne.”

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