Subjects or slaves?

Writing within the privacy of his study in the 1610s, Sir Anthony Benn concluded that there was no need to worry that strong monarchical government would lead to tyranny. All the ‘hartburning and the quarrell’ in his day was about nothing more than ‘money tribute, taxes and impositions’. It was not about ‘our lives, nor our liberties, nor that our sonnes are to be made slaves’. One wonders, therefore, how he would have described the later 1620s, when according to many a speech in parliament, and a fair number of courtroom briefs, the liberty of the subject was in great peril. Indeed, one of the most recurring rhetorical devices in the parliamentary debates of 1628 and 1629 probed the heart of the relationship between subjects and monarchical states: a people whose property could be taken from them at the will of the monarch were slaves, not subjects. Or, to put it in tenurial terms familiar in English land law, they were serfs or villeins rather than free tenants whose rights to property were protected by law.

First enunciated in a parliamentary setting during the Impositions debates, by the late 1620s this formula was as likely to fall from the lips of laymen such as Sir Dudley Digges as it was from lawyer MPs such as Sir Edward Coke. Although it can be found in works within the English legal tradition such as Bracton, it was probably more familiar outside the courtroom than within it.