Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

The Structure of English Common Law in the Seventeenth Century 79
beyond. Law went through five editions by 1700, 89 and several copies made the
crossing to seventeenth century Virginia, where colonists were much in need
of short and comprehensive works on the principles of common law. 90 Law
remained in print in the eighteenth century, and one enterprising publisher in
1759 even brought out an English translation of Nomotexnia to compete head
to head with a new edition of Law. 91
Other writers imitated, adapted and borrowed freely from Finch's structure
for introductory books of their own. 92 In 1654 Edmund Wingate, a mathematician
and common lawyer, published A Summary of the Common Law of
England, a set of forty-seven elaborate tables that he 'extracted' from Books
II through IV of Finch's Law. The first table showed the common law
divided into persons (the 'circumstances' of the law), 'parts' (possessions
and punishment of offences), and actions (the 'common affection' running
through the law). 93 A year later Wingate appended those tables to his
own work, The Body of the Common Law of England, in which he
again followed Finch's plan, with slight modifications, to sort through a
collection of hundreds of short, numbered 'rules of law'. 94 Michael Hawke,
another mid century writer, drew upon Finch for his Grounds of the Lawes
of England, and praised him for 'reducing not only the body of our laws into
a compendious method, but also the grounds and rules of the same into an
academical order'. 95
Any estimate of the overall influence of a book like Finch's Law in shaping
seventeenth-century lawyers' conceptions of the whole of their common
law must begin by reckoning with another, more important work, Coke's
Institutes. In 1628 Edward Coke published the first of his Institutes, the
famous Commentary on Littleton, the only part Coke published during his
lifetime. His work on the next three volumes was well advanced by 1628 and
complete by 1633, but the second part, a commentary on important statutes,
did not appear until 1642, and the third and fourth parts, on pleas of the
89 Editions in 1636,1661,1671 and 1678. A. W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue,
W.A. Jackson et al., ed., 2nd ed. (1976), i, no.10872; D. Wing, A Short-Title Catalogue (New York,
1972), ii, no. F931.
90 W.M. Billings, 'English Legal Literature as a Source of Law and Legal Practice for Seventeenth-
Century Virginia', Virginia Mag., Ixxxvii (1979), 411-12; W.H. Bryson, Census of Law Books in
Colonial Virginia (Charlottesville, Va., 1978), 48.
91 H. Finch, A Description of the Common Laws of England, According to the Rules of Art (1759). The
anonymous translator announced it 'the first general Institute of the Laws of England', and praised the
originality and 'peculiarity' of Finch's plan, Translator's Preface, v. For the title of 'first' of the English
institutional writers, Finch also got the vote of Lawson, 'Institutes', 342.
92 E.g., the first chapter of A Treatise of the Principall Grounds and Maximes of the Lawes of this
Kingdom (1641), attributed to William Noy, a prominent lawyer and contemporary of Finch.
93 [E. Wingate], A Summary of the Common Law of England (1654).
94 E. Wingate, The Body of the Common Law of England (1655); see R. Pound, 'The Maxims of
Equity - I', Harvard Law Rev., xxxiv (1921), 834.
95 M. Hawke, The Grounds of the Lawes of England (1657), sig. a2; Simpson, 'Rise and Fall of the
Legal Treatise', 650.