English Common Law in Spenser’s British Chronicle

‘As a key to their past the English knew of one law alone,’ that is, ‘the common law of the king’s courts’.1 And the English common law is different from other laws in origin and status: ‘[c]ivil and canon law and law merchant could be regarded, especially after the Reformation, as systems borrowed from abroad and confined within limits by the common law’.2 In Edmund Spenser’s time, English common law was subjected to criticisms from home and abroad. Many of these critics were eminent, and accordingly such criticisms were quite damaging. To be specific, for example, Francois Hotman, a French Protestant lawyer, labeled the English common law as a ‘late invention’; Polydore Vergil, the Italian historian employed by Henry VII and Henry VIII, indicated that William the Conqueror introduced the law to England; and even Raphael Holinshed ‘had criticized the common law’.3 Meanwhile, Spenser’s time also witnessed ‘the development of a significant body of common law’.4 For example, its scope was enlarged: ‘some rights to jurisdiction that had once belonged exclusively to the Church’ were ‘conferred on the common law courts’.5