The powerful rhetorical connection Francis Ashley drew in his reading on Magna Carta between the law of England and the liberties and franchises of its freemen reflects one of the most striking features of the culture of the rule of law in the early modern period: the existence of a language of liberty. Furthermore, the subject matter of Ashley's lecture, which was concerned primarily with lesser polities and the ecclesiastical courts, as well as his later involvement in the Case of the Five Knights in the 1620s, suggests that he was expressing a version of early modern ‘rights speak’ associated as much with ordinary subjects going about their daily business as with the predicament of country squires imprisoned at the will of the crown.

On the other hand, while there was often an explicit recognition in early modern legal rhetoric of a principle of self-preservation that lay at the heart of all legal and political relationships, and a growing awareness of a distinction between the private interests of individuals and the public interests of the state, the liberties Ashley and other jurists praised were not based to any very significant extent on systematic theories of natural right. The Ciceronian values expressed so often in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century charges at assizes and other local courts either explicitly or implicitly identified the rule of law with the protection of the subject, his family, his lands and his goods.