William Lambarde, Elizabethan Law Reform, and Early Stuart Politics

William Lambarde (1536–1601) has been much celebrated, and cited, by historians of Tudor England. Besides compiling what is generally recognized as the earliest county history (A Perambulation of Kent, completed in 1570; first published in 1576) and a pioneering edition of Anglo-Saxon laws and customs (Archaionomia, 1568), Lambarde's famous manual on the duties, powers, and responsibilities of justices of the peace (Eirenarcha, 1581) “gives an account, which is both complete and systematic, of the organization of the local government … as it stood at the end of the sixteenth century.” Although his abilities and achievements received only a modest measure of contemporary recognition, toward the end of his life Lambarde successively acquired the posts of Deputy in the Alienations Office (1589), Master in Chancery Extraordinary (1592), Master in Chancery and Deputy Keeper of the Rolls (1597), and Keeper of Records in the Tower of London (1601). He had been associated to the bench of Lincoln's Inn in 1579 (having, as the Black Book citation put it, “deserved universallie well of his comon wealth and contrie”); these promotions induced the ruling Council to make him a full bencher, “being one of Her Majesties Masters of hir Court of Chancery and of great reading, learning and experience.”In depicting the conscientious Elizabethan J.P. as burdened by “stacks of statutes,” Lambarde coined a phrase which has indeed “burrowed its way into most historical textbooks.” Besides numerous articles, modern scholarly interest in the man and his works has generated two biographies (published in 1965 and 1973), while the point of departure for John Howes Gleason's institutional-cumprosopographical account of local government under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts was Lambarde's own record of his activities as a Kentish justice in the 1580s.