The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England

Mark Fortier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317036661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Elizabeth and James, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Bacon and Ellesmere, Perkins and Laud, Milton and Hobbes-this begins a list of early modern luminaries who write on 'equity'. In this study Mark Fortier addresses the concept of equity from early in the sixteenth century until 1660, drawing on the work of lawyers, jurists, politicians, kings and parliamentarians, theologians and divines, poets, dramatists, colonists and imperialists, radicals, royalists, and those who argue on gender issues. He examines how writers in all these groups make use of the word equity and its attendant notions. Equity, he argues, is a powerful concept in the period; he analyses how notions of equity play a prominent part in discourses that have or seek to have influence on major social conflicts and issues in early modern England. Fortier here maps the actual and extensive presence of equity in the intellectual life of early modern England. In so doing, he reveals how equity itself acts as an umbrella term for a wide array of ideas, which defeats any attempt to limit narrowly the meaning of the term. He argues instead that there is in early modern England a distinct and striking culture of equity characterized and strengthened by the diversity of its genealogy and its applications. This culture manifests itself, inter alia, in the following major ways: as a basic component, grounded in the old and new testaments, of a model for Christian society; as the justification for a justice system over and above the common law; as an imperative for royal prerogative; as a free ranging subject for poetry and drama; as a nascent grounding for broadly cast social justice; as a rallying cry for revolution and individual rights and freedoms. Working from an empirical account of the many meanings of equity over time, the author moves from a historical understanding of equity to a theorization of equity in its multiplicity. A profoundly literary study, this book also touches on matters of legal an

Chapter 1
Christian Equity

The history of equity in early modern England has been seen predominantly as a part of legal history. Among the many facets that are eclipsed in such a view–indeed the most significant–is the role that religion plays in equitable thought, and that concepts of equity play in religious thought. Religion rivals, and perhaps surpasses, law in its prominence as a source for notions of equity in the period. Moreover, religion gives to equity more fervour and personal commitment than law courts are able to instill. Equity matters as much as it does in early modern England in large part because it has the authority of God behind it. In addition, religious equity informs other areas of thought and in itself and in its influence contributes to the overall richness of notions of equity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The importance of equity as a religious notion arises firstly from its flourishing in translations of the Bible, which then inform its use in public and private worship. This flourishing is centred in the Old Testament, the translation of the Hebrew Bible, especially in Psalms, which provides, through its proliferation and dissemination in book, song, ritual, and prayer, a general interiorized familiarity with, as well as a ready source of standard quotations concerning, equity. A certain cluster of ideas arises from these translations. God judges in equity, bringing succour to the few upright victims and harsh punishment to the ubiquitous iniquitous oppressors. Despite the compelling prominence of biblical equity, there is relatively little theological elaboration of exactly what this equity entails. What elaboration there is, especially among those attached to the established church, supports traditional authority, including, as we shall see in a later chapter, established political authority, fosters public order and obedience and muffles the association of equity with mercy by affirming the equity of just punishment (as in Thomas Adams). These are ideas that we will find at play elsewhere, in such works of poetry as Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. Old Testament equity also serves, in John Knox, as a justification for harsh and unalterable predestination. Sometimes religious thinkers–Thomas Scott, for example–turn to Aristotelian and other secular notions to help elucidate religious equity. Nevertheless, Old Testament equity remains, despite its high textual prominence, somewhat conceptually underdeveloped–especially when compared with what arises from an equity based more in the New Testament.

Equity does not appear in English translations of the New Testament, but theologians still find a model for equity in Christ, in his kindness, his mercy, and in his dicta, especially “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. From these suggestions (and borrowing from classical and secular sources), Protestant and dissenting theologians on the continent (Luther and Calvin) and in England (Perkins and Ames) develop distinct and elaborate models for Christian bearing and community based in, variously, forbearance, reciprocity and moderation. Thus, religious thinkers bring secular ideas of equity, such as a resort to natural law over positive law, a personal virtue of forbearance, the intention of the law over the letter and the mitigation of the rigour of the law, into play with resonant Christian notions, such as God as the bringer of divine justice and mercy, Christian meekness, the golden rule as the foundation of Christian relations and the authority of the individual Christian conscience. In varying ways, equity becomes the basis for Christian community in all its elements, both public and private. This thinking, especially in the casuist exploration of the free Christian conscience, even as it finds grounds for respecting traditional law and authority, opens up a basic questioning of the law that will have powerful political influence in the 1640s and 1650s. In religious contexts as elsewhere, what is remarkable is both the variety of meanings and uses given to equity and how widespread and compelling it is in early modern thinking.

The Old Testament from Hebrew to English

Central to the relation of equity and religion in the period are the translations of the Bible into English and the effects that these translations had on religious thought and ritual. Between 1535 and 1611 there were seven major translations of the Bible into English, translations which met with varying degrees of official and unofficial acceptance, but which as a movement had a profound influence on the Reformation in England and therefore on English thinking, public and private, and on everyday English life. For broad reasons beyond the history of equity, Benson Bobrick writes, “Before the advent of the vernacular Bible, which was made available to the general public by printing, most people did not know what the Bible actually said”, and “Next to the Bible itself, the English Bible was (and is) the most influential book ever published [since i]t gave every literate person complete access to the sacred text”.1 Whether or not this second claim stands up in an international context, the English Bible was certainly an extremely important text in early modern England. Alister McGrath writes:

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Bible was seen as a social, economic, and political text. Those seeking to overthrow the English monarchy and those wanting to retain it both sought support from the same Bible. The Bible came to be seen as the foundation of every aspect of English culture, linking monarch and church, time and eternity.2

For a study of early modern equity, scripture is central because the word equity appears repeatedly in the English translations.

The early modern translation of the Bible into English takes place in a tradition that is complex and contradictory. The Hebrew word that often appears as equity in English Bibles is mešarîm, which occurs nineteen times in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Mešarîm is a plural noun from a root (as in the adjective yasher and the noun yosher) that implies even, straight, smooth, upright, level, and means evenness, rectitude or uprightness.3 William Robertson defines the word in his 1656 Key to the Hebrew Bible:

Mishor, uprightnesse, or streightnesse, and plainness or an equal, even, and plain place: plain or champion ground: as if the rightnesse; or streightness of the ground. The root is … jashar, he was right: and hence also the noun in plur … mesharim, righteous things, or things that are just and equal.4

The history of translation of the Hebrew Bible is a complex story of the appearance and disappearance of words for equity. The Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, does not translate mešarîm as έπιείκεια but rather in a number of other ways. Psalms 98:9 and 99:4 have, as at a number of other places, εύθύτης, derived from εύθύς (straight), meaning righteousness.5 The most important Latin Bible, the Vulgate, which dominated Christian Europe for a millenium, regularly has aequitas as a translation for mešarîm, for example in Psalms 9:8, 96:10, 98:9 (“Iudicabit orbem terrarum in iustitia et populos in aequitate”), and Proverbs 1:3 and 2:9. It may be that Jerome, the Latin translator, saw in the Hebrew term a general notion of fairness as in aequitas, or perhaps the sense of the equal or level (aequus) was seen to echo the sense of levelness in the Hebrew term–as did the Greek εύθύτης. The Vulgate does not always translate mešarîm as aequitas (for example, not at Psalms 99:4) and sometimes it uses aequitas where there is no mešarîm in the Hebrew (for example, at Isaiah 11:4).6

The English translation of the Bible also took place in the context of early modern translations into other vernaculars. French Bibles in the sixteenth century follow the Latin model, with some variation: Psalm 89 reads, “Justice & equité sont l’establissemēt de ton throne”; Psalm 98: “il jugera le monde en justice, & les peuples en equité”.7 German has no word for equity. Thus in Luther’s German text, variations on the word “recht” appear where mešarîm or aequitas might appear. In this, however, Luther follows other Latin translations, where rectitudo appears.8

These various versions of the Old Testament all influenced early modern English translations, the Hebrew for its authenticity, the Greek for its antiquity, the Latin because of its authority (for better and worse), the French because of the dominant linguistic influence of French in England, and the German because of Reformation sympathies.9 What English translators had to work with, therefore, was a complex dynamic indeed: the Hebrew mešarîm, meaning uprightness, and its parallel associations with words for truth, righteousness and justice; the Greek εύθύτης; the Latin aquinas, for evenness or fairness, familiar as a term in law and moral philosophy, and its associations with rectitude, justice and judgment; the French equité and its associations with justice and fidelity; the German recht and its associations with judgment, justice, righteousness and right. In all this there is no consistent association of one Hebrew word with equity nor a clear understanding of what the Hebrew original entails. There is, perhaps, a sense that the Bible calls for uprightness and evenness, but this metaphorical notion, whatever it may imply in the particulars of morality, can be caught as readily by words other than equity–rectitude equally implies a physical and by extrapolation moral straightness. The English Bible follows in the complexities of these traditions by utilizing the word equity but in varying and inconsistent ways and by using the word to invoke, by itself and with other terms, a somewhat loose but suggestive notion of moral and religious rectitude. But wherever it might have come from and whatever it might mean, the presence of the word equity in the English Bible, that most important of books, could not help but attract attention, respect and commitment.

The early modern English Bibles are inconsistent in their use of “equity” to translate the Hebrew Bible. The 1535 Coverdale Bible has equity in Psalm 98 (”The kynges power loveth judgment, thou prepares equate, thou executes judgmēt & righteousness in Jacob”) but not at other likely places in Psalms. It also has equity in Proverbs 2 (“Then SHALT thou understand righteousness, judgment and equite, yee and every good path”), Isaiah 56 (“Thus Saint the HORDE: Keep equate, and do right”) and 59 (“In their going’s is no equate, their Hayes are so croked …. And this is the cause that equities is so far fro us”), and Baluchi 2 (“He walked with me in peace ād equyte”).10 The Great Bible of 1550 has equity at Psalms 98:9 and 99:4 (“thou haste prepared equyte”).11 The Geneva Bible of 1560 has equity at Psalms 9:8, 17:2, 89:14 (“Righteousness & equities are the establishment of thy throne”), 98:9 (“with righteousnes Hal he judge the world, and the people with equities”) and 99:4; wording similar in all other regards to 9:8 and 98:9 has, at 96:13, “in his truth” in the place of “with equitie”; equity is also found at Proverbs 1:3 and 2:9, and “equal path” is found at Isaiah 26:7; equity is also found in the apocryphal Wisdom of Salomon at 9:3; the famous and controversial explanatory notes of this edition, however, have nothing to say about equity.12 The Edinburgh Bible of 1579 has equity at Psalms 9:8, 98:9 (“for he is come to judge the earth: with righteousness shall he judge the world, and the people with equities”) and 99:4, Proverbs 1:3 and 2:9, Ecclesiastic 2:21 (“For there is a man whose travail is in wisdom, & in knowledge and in equitie”), Isaiah 11:4 (“But with righteousnes shal he judge the poore, and with equities Hal he reprove for the Mike of the earth”), and 59:14 (“for truth is fallen in the street, & equities can not enter”), Mica 3:9 (“they abhorred judgement, &...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Roguish Thing
• 1 Christian Equity
• 2 Equity and Law
• 3 Political Equity
• 4 Poetic Equity
• 5 Equity and Others
• 6 Radical Equity
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index