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

The Structure of English Common Law in the Seventeenth Century 81
unstructured forms of legal writing that had been devised to accompany the
oral transmission of learning. The figure of Coke looms over seventeenthcentury
legal education, and the Commentary on Littleton was probably the
most important text for students of the common law. But it was not the only
text.
If students and practitioners had taken their conception of the common
law solely from Coke's Institutes, they would have found what Coke himself
described: 'a deep well', dark, mysterious, bottomless, the source of more
learning than any single mind, even Coke's, could fathom. 101 Using an
introductory work like Finch's Law, on the other hand, gave students an
image of the common law as a vast diagram extending from the highest
generalities to the most minute details; again, no one could conceive it all at
once, but its general contours, its main parts and the ways they fit together,
were fixed and known.
Many of the students coming to the Inns of Court to take up study of
the common law were probably predisposed to accept Finch's conception
of the common law. In 1654 the anonymous preface to the Summary of the
Common Law of England, probably by the mathematician Edmund Wingate,
praised Finch for having clothed the law in a 'logical method' so exact that it
rivalled the leading textbooks on theology, geometry, logic, physics, politics
and mathematics, including works by such noted scholars as Ramus himself. 102
This reminds us that the primary impact of Ramist method was on school
and university textbooks. 103 Many of the standard school primers that were
published in vast quantities in the seventeenth century tended to use the same
sort of definitions, distinctions, tables and elaborate typographical display of
information that students would later encounter in Finch's work. Seventeenthcentury
textbooks shaped students' expectations of what it meant to know, or
begin to know, a new field of learning, and prepared them better to accept a
common law of nesting categories than one of disjointed particulars dredged
up from a deep well of collective wisdom.
Could Finch's form and Coke's substance be combined? The advice of
Thomas Wood to 'young beginners' at common law, given soon after the
close of the century, suggests that some were doing just this. He told students
to read Finch first, 'the most methodical book extant' by a common lawyer,
then to plough through Coke's Institutes, which he conceded contained 'the
best authorities in our law'. 104 '[W]hatever is read' in Coke, the author
101
Ibid., fo.71a. See Calvin's Case (1607), 7 Co. Rep. la, 4a ('no man ought to take upon himself to
be wiser than the law').
102 Wingate, Preface to Summary of the Common Law, sig. A3.
103 Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, 9.
104 T Wood, Some Thoughts Concerning the Study of the Laws of England in the Two Universities
(1708), rptd. The Gladsome Light of Jurisprudence: Learning the Law in England and the United
States in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, M.H. Hoeflich, ed. and comp. (Westport, Conn.,
1988), 46-47. Wood, himself a civilian, gave Finch high marks for 'almost' following the method of
Justinian's Institutes, ibid., 46.