The laws of nature and the nature of law: insights from an English rebel, 1641–57

ABSTRACT

Both law and science went through revolutionary changes in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, a period of pandemic, conflict, and climate change. The circle of Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62) sought a way to regenerate society through reform and innovation. One member of the circle was Sir Cheney Culpeper (1601–66), a barrister and landowner, whose correspondence shows an attempt to synthesize law and natural philosophy into a coherent vision of regeneration. He wrestled as much with how change could be achieved as with what changes would be beneficial. He sought a mutually beneficial relationship between humanity and nature. He urged self-restraint to avoid the abuse of power, political and technological. His most practical and influential work was in agriculture. Paradoxically, however, the efforts of Culpeper and his circle to address the crises of their times have arguably created the very crises of ours. We are, moreover, in what Culpeper describes as a ‘crisis of time’. This essay poses the question as to whether, given the urgency of our situation, we might learn from Culpeper’s generation that regeneration requires revolution as well as reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Global crisis
• English civil war
• climate change
• common law
• natural law
• Hartlib circle

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The definitive source is Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Mark Hannon, ‘The Hartlib Papers’ (The Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, 2013), https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/., hereafter HP. I have modernized spelling and punctuation. Unless otherwise stated, HP letters are from Culpeper to Hartlib.

2 George Henry Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury and Comenius: Gleanings from Hartlib’s Papers (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1947); Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660, 1st ed., Studies in the History of Medicine (London: Duckworth, 1975); Stéphane Haffemayer, Les Lumières Radicales de La Révolution Anglaise. Samuel Hartlib et Les Réseaux de l’Intelligence (1600–1660) (Classiques Garnier, 2018). Also, Charles Webster, Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Charles Webster, In Times of Strife (Oxford: Taylor Institution Library, 2023); and Rob Iliffe, ‘Hartlib’s World’, in London and beyond: Essays in Honour of Derek Keene, ed. Matthew Davies and James A. Galloway (University of London Press, 2012), 103–22, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv5131n6.12.

3 M. J. Braddick and Mark Greengrass, ‘The Letters of Sir Cheney Culpeper, 1641–1657’, Royal Historical Society Camden Fifth Series 7 (July 1996): 105–402, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960116300000373.

4 Stephen Clucas, ‘The Correspondence of a XVII-Century “Chymicall Gentleman”: Sir Cheney Culpeper and the Chemical Interests of the Hartlib Circle’, Ambix 40, no. 3 (1 November 1993): 147–70, https://doi.org/10.1179/amb.1993.40.3.147.

5 Koji Yamamoto, ‘Reformation and the Distrust of the Projector in the Hartlib Circle’, The Historical Journal 55, no. 2 (June 2012): 375–97, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X12000064; Ted McCormick, ‘Improvement, Projecting, and Self-Interest in the Hartlib Circle, c. 1640–1660’, in Historicizing Self-Interest in the Modern Atlantic World (Routledge, 2021); Vera Keller and Ted McCormick, ‘Towards a History of Projects’, Early Science and Medicine 21, no. 5 (2016): 423–44, https://doi.org/10.1163/15733823-00215p01.

6 David R. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford: University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199541911.001.0001.

7 Clucas, ‘The Correspondence of a XVII-Century “Chymicall Gentleman”’, 159.

8 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 328. The relationship between climate change and society is the subject of considerable scholarship, including recently Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (London: Bloomsbury, 2023). It has also been contested and qualified, for example in Dagomar Degroot et al., ‘Towards a Rigorous Understanding of Societal Responses to Climate Change’, Nature 591, no. 7851 (March 2021): 539–50, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03190-2.

9 Buck describes the ‘revolution of the Saints’, its commitments to Baconian method and public welfare, and connections with the Civil War, while warning that ‘with scientific, social, and political issues so intertwined, making either revolution simply the context for the other distorts the situation’. Peter Buck, ‘Order and Control: The Scientific Method in China and the United States’, Social Studies of Science 5, no. 3 (1975): 265–67.

10 Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts: 1590–1640, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 123, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108955737.

11 Francis Bacon, The New Organon. Ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: University Press, 2000), 2.

12 E. W. Ives, The English Revolution, 1600–1660 (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 124–25.

13 Allen D. Boyer, ‘Coke, Sir Edward’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (November 14, 2018).

14 Elizabeth Read Foster, ‘Petitions and the Petition of Right’, Journal of British Studies 14, no. 1 (1974): 26, 35, 40.

15 Paul Christianson, ‘Selden, John’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (January 3, 2008).

16 In describing the legal phenomenon, Cromartie notes that indictments at the Assizes in the southeast of England ‘peaked in the hard times of the mid 1590s [and were] to reach another peak in the famine years of the early 1620s’. Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642, 75 (Cambridge: University Press, 2006), 180, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511617775. (Citing Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, 1550–1640, Early Modern History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 103.) On the 1590s, see R. B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth, the English Crown and the Crisis of the 1590s’, in The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 23–43; Geoffrey Parker, ‘History and Climate: The Crisis of the 1590s Reconsidered’, in Climate Change and Cultural Transition in Europe (Brill, 2018), 119–55.

17 Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

18 Parker, Global Crisis, 211–53.

19 Mark Greengrass, ‘Culpeper, Sir Cheney’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (January 3, 2008).

20 Elizabeth Stuart to Sir James Hay (1580–1636), first Earl of Carlisle, June 21, 1629 (Letter 512) in Elizabeth Stuart, The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia. Vol. 1, 1603–1631. Ed. Nadine Akkerman, Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (Oxford: University Press, 2016), 751. ‘I send Culpeper to visit the King my brother and the Queen upon this evil accident of her miscarrying, which I was very sorry for. He can tell you all the news of the siege. I am in this place where I can hear every shot of Canon and Muskett’.

21 D. J. B. Trim, ‘Vere, Horace [Horatio], Baron Vere of Tilbury’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (December 10, 2020).

22 Braddick and Greengrass, ‘Letters’, 123–24. On Culpeper’s connections with the Hague.

23 Elizabeth Stuart to Sir Thomas Roe (1581–1644), July 11, 1631 (Letter 572): Stuart, The Correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia. Vol. 1, 1603–1631, 841. A decade later, Culpeper would be estranged from his father ‘only because I adhered to the Parliament’: Undated (1643/44?) (HP 13/314A).

24 January 9, 1644 (HP 13/28B).

25 John Gauden, ‘The Love of Truth and Peace. A Sermon before the House of Commons by John Gauden’, 1641.

26 The total word count of Culpeper’s letters is 79,261, averaging 422 words per letter, and the median letter is 296 words long.

27 Clucas, ‘The Correspondence of a XVII-Century “Chymicall Gentleman”’, 147.

28 Ibid., 150.

29 October 1, 1646 (HP 13/147B).

30 On armaments, October 4, 1643 (HP 13/11A–B). Agriculture is discussed below.

31 September 15, 1657 (HP 42/15/9A).

32 Clucas, ‘The Correspondence of a XVII-Century “Chymicall Gentleman”’, 153–54.

33 Webster, In Times of Strife, 94. Reading July 17, 1645 (HP 95B–96B).

34 December, 1645 (HP 13/109B).

35 Ibid (HP 13/109A).

36 March 15, 1648 (HP 13/209B). Also, May 6, 1645 (HP 13/87A) and May 20, 1645 (HP 13/88A).

37 August 14, 1649 (HP 13/260B–13/261A).

38 Culpeper to Worsley, May 9, 1648 (HP 13/217A–217B).

39 January 21, 1645 (HP 13/67A).

40 Culpeper appears to be going some way down the path described by Osler: ‘With the mechanical reinterpretation of final causes, the idea of individual natures that possess immanent finality was replaced with the idea of nature as a whole which is the product of the divine artificer.’ Margaret J. Osler, ‘From Immanent Natures to Nature as Artifice: The Reinterpretation of Final Causes in Seventeenth-Century Natural Philosophy’, The Monist 79, no. 3 (1 July 1996): 390, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist199679318.

41 Peter Wright, ‘Astrology and Science in Seventeenth-Century England’, Social Studies of Science 5, no. 4 (1975): 399–422, 421–22.

42 Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 106; Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978).

43 Oana Matei, ‘Husbandry Tradition and the Emergence of Vegetable Philosophy in the Hartlib Circle’, Philosophia: International Journal of Philosophy 16, no. 1 (2015): 40, 45. Matei does not cite Culpeper here, but does so elsewhere: Oana Matei, ‘Experimenting with Matter in the Works of Gabriel Plattes’, Perspectives on Science 28, no. 3 (1 June 2020): 398–420; Oana Matei, ‘Gabriel Plattes, Hartlib Circle and the Interest for Husbandry in the Seventeenth Century England’, Prolegomena 11, no. 2 (2012): 207–24; Oana Matei, ‘Macaria, the Hartlib Circle, and Husbanding Creation’, Societate Şi Politică 7, no. 2 (2013): 7–33.

44 Paul Warde, ‘The Idea of Improvement, c. 1520–1700’, in Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain, ed. Richard W. Hoyle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 136, 137–43.

45 Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850, Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511607967.

46 Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press, 2001); Timothy Johnson, ‘Nitrogen Nation: The Legacy of World War I and the Politics of Chemical Agriculture in the United States, 1916–1933’, Agricultural History 90, no. 2 (2016): 209–29, https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2016.090.2.209; Glenn Davis Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2022).

47 Agroecological practices are ‘techniques that contribute to a more environmentally friendly, ecological, organic or alternative agriculture’: A. Wezel et al., ‘Agroecology as a Science, a Movement and a Practice. A Review’, Agronomy for Sustainable Development 29, no. 4 (2009): 511, https://doi.org/10.1051/agro/2009004.

48 Norman Uphoff, ‘SRI: An Agroecological Strategy to Meet Multiple Objectives with Reduced Reliance on Inputs’, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 41, no. 7 (August 9, 2017): 826, https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2017.1334738.

49 Notably, Samuel Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib, His Legacy of Husbandry […], 3rd ed. (London: Printed by J.M. for Richard Wodnotche, 1655).

50 January 4, 1645 (HP 13/59A–60B).

51 Antonio Clericuzio, ‘Plant and Soil Chemistry in Seventeenth-Century England: Worsley, Boyle and Coxe’, Early Science and Medicine 23, no. 5 (2018): 554.

52 Undated (late 1645?), (HP 13/279A–283B). Worsley’s project is described by Clericuzio, ‘Plant and Soil Chemistry in Seventeenth-Century England’, 564–67; Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660, 377–80; Charles Webster, ‘Benjamin Worsley’, in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: University Press, 1994), 213–35; Justin Niermeier-Dohoney, ‘A Vital Matter: Alchemy, Cornucopianism, and Agricultural Improvement in Seventeenth-Century England’ (The University of Chicago, 2018), 79–128, https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/vital-matter-alchemy-cornucopianism-agricultural/docview/2161867295/se-2. Leng places Worsley’s project in its wider contexts: Thomas Leng, Benjamin Worsley (1618–1677): Trade, Interest, and the Spirit in Revolutionary England, Royal Historical Society Studies in History. New Series (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008).

53 Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660, 379; Niermeier-Dohoney, ‘A Vital Matter: Alchemy, Cornucopianism, and Agricultural Improvement in Seventeenth-Century England’, 88 (n. 21).

54 Boyle to Worsley, after December 1, 1646, Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence https://doi.org/10.13051/ee:doc/boylroPC0010042a1c (accessed May 6, 2023).

55 For example, S. A. Khan, R. L. Mulvaney, and T. R. Ellsworth, ‘The Potassium Paradox: Implications for Soil Fertility, Crop Production and Human Health’, Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 29, no. 1 (March 2014): 3–27, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742170513000318.

56 February 18, 1653 (HP 39/1/5A–B). This paradox is noted also in Justin Niermeier-Dohoney, ‘“Rusticall Chymistry”: Alchemy, Saltpeter Projects, and Experimental Fertilizers in Seventeenth-Century English Agriculture’, History of Science 60, no. 4 (1 December 2022): 546, https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211033159.

57 James N. Galloway et al., ‘A Chronology of Human Understanding of the Nitrogen Cycle’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 368, no. 1621 (5 July 2013): 5, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0120.

58 Mark A. Sutton et al., ‘Too Much of a Good Thing’, Nature 472, no. 7342 (April 2011): 159–61, https://doi.org/10.1038/472159a; Johan Rockström et al., ‘Safe and Just Earth System Boundaries’, Nature, 31 May 2023, 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06083-8; Glenn Davis Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2022).

59 Joan Thirsk, The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. V, 1500–1750 Pt II Agrarian Change, Vol. V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 533–42.

60 Gregory Clark, ‘The Economics of Exhaustion, the Postan Thesis, and the Agricultural Revolution’, The Journal of Economic History 52, no. 1 (1992): 61–84.

61 See note 139 below.

62 July 6, 1648 (HP 13/225A); July 12, 1648 (HP 13/227A); July 19, 1648 (HP 13/229A); August 16, 1648 (HP 13/238A); August 30, 1648 (HP 13/242A).

63 Correspondent in Dublin to Hartlib (?), May 16, 1654 (‘Pray Sir present my humble service to honest Sir C. Culpepper, when you write to him, and my thanks for his so free communications of his Clover-grasses husbandry’); Culpeper to correspondent in Dublin, 1654–55; and Correspondent in Dublin to Culpeper, 1654–55, Hartlib, Samuel Hartlib, His Legacy of Husbandry, 248–50.

64 Uphoff, ‘SRI’, 840.

65 Stone, The Agricultural Dilemma, 115.

66 Undated (late 1645?) (HP 13/279). ‘Gavelkind’ here means an equal share as discussed further below. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the potential tension between the local Kentish system of inheritance and agroecological practices if, for example, the former led to smaller field sizes. The effects of gavelkind on land tenure are explored by Imogen Kathleen Wedd, ‘Gavelkind and the Land Market in Somerden Hundred, Kent, 1550–1700’ (University of Cambridge, 2020), https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.49923.

67 Genesis 26:12 ‘Then Isaac sowed in that land, and received in the same year an hundredfold: and the LORD blessed him’. (KJV).

68 Culpeper did not, however, approve of ‘metaphors and allegories’ relating to the ‘commonwealth of bees’: Timothy Raylor, ‘Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees’, in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester: University Press, 1992), 112.

69 January 21, 1645, (HP 13/67A).

70 April 30, 1646 (HP 13/144B).

71 December 27, 1643 (HP 13/25A).

72 July–August, 1642 (HP 13/329A–329B). The original form is retained to show Hartlib’s interpolations.

73 Matthew 7:12 (KJV).

74 Theophylactus of Ochrida, Theophylacti, Bulgariae archiepiscopi, Opera quae reperiri potuerunt omnia: accedit Fr. J. R. Mariae Bern. de Rubeis dissertatio de ipsius Theophylacti aetate, gestis, scriptis ac doctrina, Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Graeca ; v. 123–126 (Parisiis: s.n., 1864), 213–14, http://dbooks.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/books/PDFs/303262390.pdf.

75 The Puritan Geneva Bible (1560) has a marginal note stating that ‘The whole Law and the Scriptures set forthe unto us, & commende charitie’. William Whittingham and Lloyd E. Berry, The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2007), BB.i.

76 John Barton and John Muddiman, The Oxford Bible Commentary (Oxford: University Press, 2001), 856.

77 D J Ibbetson, ‘Natural Law and Common Law’, Edinburgh Law Review 5, no. 1 (January 2001): 6, https://doi.org/10.3366/elr.2001.5.1.4.

78 July–August, 1642 (HP 13/329B).

79 November 6, 1644 (HP 13/54A).

80 January 3, 1644 (HP 13/8A).

81 Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War, 367–83.

82 The present tense here could mean that Culpeper does not know the King is dead, or that he is speaking of kings in general and not Charles I.

83 January 31, 1649 (HP 13/248A–249B).

84 Undated (Autumn, 1644?) (HP 13/317A).

85 Eden, the Fall, and the return to Eden underpinned the ideology of the Hartlib circle: James Bennett and Scott Mandelbrot, ‘Biblical Interpretation and the Improvement of Society: Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662) and His Circle’, Intellectual News 3, no. 1 (1998): 19–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/15615324.2001.10426675.

86 Undated (Autumn, 1644?) (HP 13/317A–B).

87 On Lady Ranelagh and the Hartlib circle: Michelle DiMeo, Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister, University Press Scholarship Online (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226731742.001.0001; Michelle DiMeo, ‘Openness vs. Secrecy in the Hartlib Circle: Revisiting “Democratic Baconianism” in Interregnum England’, in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800, ed. Elaine Yuen Tien Leong and Alisha Michelle Rankin, History of Medicine in Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 105–21; Evan Bourke, ‘Female Involvement, Membership, and Centrality: A Social Network Analysis of the Hartlib Circle’, Literature Compass 14, no. 4 (2017): e12388, https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12388; Ruth Connolly, ‘‘“A Wise and Godly Sybilla”: Viscountess Ranelagh and the Politics of International Protestantism’, in Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, ed. Sylvia Brown (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007), 285–306, https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004163065.i-325; Ruth Connolly, ‘Viscountess Ranelagh and the Authorisation of Women’s Knowledge in the Hartlib Circle’, in The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680, ed. Johanna Harris and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Early Modern Literature in History (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2010), 150–61, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289727_12.

88 September 15, 1647 (HP 13/188A–191B); Lady Ranelagh to Hartlib, September 22, 1647 (HP 26/13/1A–2B).

89 Ibid, (13/188A–B).

90 Corinne Comstock Weston and Janelle Renfrow Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 35–86, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511558658. Weston and Greenberg argue that the decisive text was the King’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions (June 18, 1642). This was drafted by Culpeper’s cousin Sir John Colepeper, to whom Culpeper wrote in 1644 seeking to convince him to change course at that ‘remaining point of time, before things come to that fatal bivium, beyond which a meeting is impossible’. February 12, 1644 (HP 13/32A).

91 September 15, 1647 (HP 13/190A).

92 Ibid.

93 This is a simplification. The different Roman terms that were variously used for natural law, and the differences and common ground between the Catholic scholastic and Protestant reform traditions, are examined, for example in Knud Haakonssen, ed., ‘Natural Law in the Seventeenth Century’, in Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15–62, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139172905.002; Knud Haakonssen, ‘Early Modern Natural Law Theories’, in The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Jurisprudence, ed. George Duke and Robert P. George, Cambridge Companions to Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 76–102, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316341544.004. For an account of natural law in the practice of English common law see Frederick Pollock, ‘The History of the Law of Nature: A Preliminary Study’, J. Soc. Comp. Legis. Ns 2 (1900): 418. For a description of natural law in the education of early modern English lawyers see R. H. Helmholz, Natural Law in Court: A History of Legal Theory in Practice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015).

94 February 24, 1646 (HP 13/188B).

95 September 15, 1647 (HP 13/190A).

96 Ibid (HP 13/189B).

97 Charles P. Sherman, ‘Acquisitive Prescription. Its Existing World-Wide Uniformity’, The Yale Law Journal 21, no. 2 (1911): 147–56, https://doi.org/10.2307/783887.

98 Alexander Batson, ‘Acquisitive Prescription in Early Modern International Law’, Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d’histoire Du Droit International 24, no. 4 (30 March 2022): 485, https://doi.org/10.1163/15718050-12340198.

99 September 15, 1647 (HP 13/189B). The opening words of the Declaration of Independence affirm that it is a tenet of natural law that people (and nations) are free and equal.

100 September 15, 1647 (HP 13/190A).

101 September 22, 1647 (HP 13/193A).

102 Ibid.

103 Culpeper cites the Latin eius est interpretare legem cuius condere.

104 For example, John Milton (1608–74) shared it: Alison A. Chapman, ‘Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries’, in Courts, Jurisdictions, and Law in John Milton and His Contemporaries (University of Chicago Press, 2020), 16–17, https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226729329. Milton was close enough for Culpeper to ask Hartlib about placing a scholar under his tutelage: November 12, 1645 (HP 13/122A). Another member of the Hartlib circle whose interests intersect with Culpeper’s is Henry Robinson (bap. 1605, d. 1673). Robert Zaller, ‘Robinson, Henry’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (October 4, 2007).

105 Thomas Edwards (1599–1647), for example, argued from the opposite side that the laws of nature supported an ‘aristocratic’ hierarchy in church governance to which Independency was repugnant. Thomas Edwards, Reasons against the Independant Government of Particular Congregations: As Also against the Toleration of Such Churches to Be Erected in This Kingdome. (London, 1641). Cited in Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War, 98. Cited in Como, Radical Parliamentarians, 98. Culpeper, with uncharacteristic humour, condemned a later work of Edwards as worthy only for use in the privy: February 24, 1646 (HP 13/138B) and Letters, 266 n. 27. Thomas Edwards, Gangræna: Or a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of the Time., 2nd ed. enlarged. (London, 1646).

106 J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century: A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution.

107 However, the ‘laws of nature’ are also fundamental to Hobbes’ thought and the legal authority of the sovereign is not unlimited: David Dyzenhaus, ‘Hobbes on the Authority of Law’, in Hobbes and the Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (Cambridge: University Press, 2012), 186–209. Especially, 188 (n. 5), 189–94.

108 Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution, 110.

109 September 30, 1645 (HP 13/108A).

110 March 20, 1644 (HP 13/38B). Letters, 198 n. 24.

111 March 20, 1644 (HP 13/38B); March 4, 1646 (HP 13/137A); and April 1646 (HP 13/146B).

112 Robert S. Hoyt, ‘The Coronation Oath of 1308: The Background of “Les Leys Et Les Custumes”’, Traditio 11 (1955): 235–57.

113 September 30, 1645 (HP 13/108A).

114 October, 1641 (?) (HP 13/325B).

115 Undated (late 1644?), (HP 13/281A). See note 65 above.

116 September 22, 1647 (HP 13/193B).

117 The Puritan alignment with legalism (and against Royalism) can be traced back to the 1560s: Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution, 117.

118 Note 2 above.

119 Howard Hotson, The Reformation of Common Learning: Post-Ramist Method and the Reception of the New Philosophy, 1618 – c.1670 (Oxford: University Press, 2020), 203–23; Stephen Clucas, ‘In Search of “The True Logick”: Methodological Eclecticism among the “Baconian Reformers”’, in Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: University Press, 1994), 51–74; Braddick and Greengrass, ‘Letters’, 190 (n. 5).

120 December 22, 1647 (HP 13/206A).

121 Culpeper to Dury, October 1641? (HP 13/326A–26B).

122 Undated (HP 13/282B).

123 May 6, 1645 (HP 13/86B).

124 January 3, 1643 (HP 13/9A).

125 December 27, 1643 (HP 13/25A) and January 3, 1643 (HP 13/9A).

126 Undated (HP 13/318B); May 6, 1645 (HP 13/86A–86B); March 18, 1645 (HP 13/79A); February 17, 1646 (HP 13/128A).

127 February 11, 1646 (HP 8/31/4B); and September 15, 1657 (HP 42/15/10A). For further analysis see Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke, Ideas in Context 80 (Cambridge: University Press, 2007).

128 February 11, 1646 (HP 8/31/8A).

129 March 15, 1648 (HP 13/210B). Braddick and Greengrass, ‘Letters’, 326 (n. 39).

130 Undated (Autumn 1645?) (HP 13/295A). See Noel Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison and His “Ark of Studies” An Episode in the History of the Organization of Knowledge’, The Seventeenth Century 19, no. 2 (1 September 2004): 196–232, https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2004.10555543.

131 March 15, 1648 (HP 13/210B) and February 17, 1646 (HP 13/127B).

132 Keller regards Culpeper as an exemplar of the desire for collaboration: Vera Keller, Knowledge and the Public Interest, 1575–1725, Cambridge Core (Cambridge: University Press, 2015), 193–95, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316273227.

133 March 11, 1646 (HP 13/141A).

134 July 22, 1647 (HP 13/258A). An observation that has troubled the present author for one.

135 Culpeper to Dury, September 26, 1648 (HP 12/24A).

136 Undated (Autumn, 1645?) (HP 13/294A); April 13, 1642 (HP 13/6B). C.f. Webster, Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning, 36.

137 Undated (late 1645?), (HP 13/279A). See below on the ‘Herculean pillars’.

138 March 4, 1646 (HP 13/136A).

139 December 3, 1643 (HP 13/18A) and April 4, 1644 (HP 13/42B).

140 February 11, 1646 (HP 8/31/5B–8/31/6B) on the economic benefits of lowering interest rates and referring to his father’s treatise on the subject: Thomas Culpeper, A Tract against the High Rate of Usurie Presented to the High Court of Parliament, … , 1641; Braddick and Greengrass, ‘Letters’, 116.

141 October 13, 1647 (HP 13/194A), where Culpeper supports a project of Pierre Le Pruvost but hopes that he ‘will quit his determination of taking men’s estates and disposing of them without their consent’. See Letters, 227 n. 45 on Le Pruvost.

142 November 10, 1647 (HP 13/202B). Yamamoto, ‘Reformation and the Distrust of the Projector in the Hartlib Circle’, 393.

143 Undated (late 1645?) (HP 13/286B); and July 22, 1645 (HP 13/99A).

144 Translating the second part of Daniel 12:4 which reads ‘But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased’. (KJV). For the significance of this verse, Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660, 2.

145 Bacon, The New Organon, 76. I.xcii.

146 March 29, 1648 (HP 13/214A).

147 November 7, 1649 (HP 13/270A).

148 March 15, 1648 (HP 13/209A).

149 September 1, 1649 (HP 13/268B). Culpeper shared much ground with the Levellers: Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War, 382. He felt their time would come: March 29, 1648 (HP 13/213B).

150 See note 37 above for full quotation.

151 April 4, 1649 (HP 13/253A).

152 The much later, seventeenth letter suggests the Civil War left the work incomplete: June 3, 1655 (HP 61/7/11A).

153 March 4, 1646 (HP 13/136A).

154 August 23, 1648 (HP 13/239B).

155 March 15, 1648 (HP 13/211A).

156 Alan Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–60 (Leicester: University Press, 1966), 274–88.

157 ‘And truly if others had my faith concerning the change that will be in the world before [16]59, they would not much seek for a perpetuity in anything but heaven’. December, 1645 (HP 13/112A).

158 January 31, 1649 (HP 13/249A).

159 November 20, 1644 (HP 13/55B).

160 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ‘AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023’, 2023, https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/; Bradley J. Cardinale et al., ‘Biodiversity Loss and Its Impact on Humanity’, Nature 486, no. 7401 (June 2012): 59–67, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11148; Jan Slingenbergh et al., ‘Ecological Sources of Zoonotic Diseases’, Revue Scientifique et Technique-Office International Des Épizooties 23, no. 2 (2004): 467–84.

161 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, ‘Agroecology and the Sustainable Development Goals’, https://www.fao.org/agroecology/overview/agroecology-and-the-sustainable-development-goals/en/ (accessed May 10, 2023).

162 See note 58 above.

163 Joana Setzer and Catherine Higham Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation: 2022 Snapshot (London School of Economics and Political Science, 2022).

164 Rupert F. Stuart-Smith et al., ‘Filling the evidentiary gap in climate litigation,’ Nature Climate Change 11, no. 8 (2021): 651–5.

165 Adrian Vermeule, Common Good Constitutionalism (Polity Press. Kindle Edition, 2022).

166 Adam Parr, ‘The Paradox Test in Climate Litigation’, Oxford Open Climate Change 3, no. 1 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgad005.