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

Introduction

Sir Cheney Culpeper has long been studied as a member of the circle of Samuel Hartlib based on his correspondence with Hartlib and others between 1641 and 1657.¹ Studies of the Hartlib circle began with Turnbull, followed by Webster’s The Great Instauration (1975), and most recently Haffemayer.² Culpeper is centre-stage in Braddick and Greengrass’s edition of his correspondence;³ Clucas’s essay on the Hartlib circle’s chemistry;⁴ and studies of its projecting and entrepreneurship by Yamamoto, McCormick and Keller.⁵ Culpeper is also studied in his capacity as a radical Parliamentarian by Como.⁶ On the whole, Culpeper is treated as an influential member of the circle, but also somewhat as a country gentleman and amateur improver. Clucas concludes that Culpeper was ‘one of those unfortunate souls described by Glauber – “those that stick to so many books, will hardly ever come to get any good, but are led out of one Labyrinth into another, spending their life miserably in watching and cares”’.⁷ Such an account of Culpeper fails to do justice to a man who was always in motion, both intellectually and in practice, and who was more radical and ambitious than this suggests.

It is not Culpeper’s endeavours in one single field that stand out, but the thematic connections between fields as broad as chemistry, agriculture, law, enterprise, technology, knowledge representation and reasoning, and the economy. These ideas are expressed in language that can be compelling, intimate, and even lyrical. Even though we only have his side of the correspondence with Hartlib, Culpeper writes so well that we never feel the absence of Hartlib’s letters, and the letters provide a fairly complete account of Culpeper’s thoughts between 1641 and 1649. The smaller number of letters from the 1650s appear as a postscript to the war years. In addition, Culpeper focused almost exclusively on topics and problems that are deeply relevant today. And he has the profound insight – often lacking among reformers – that it is not the merits of the various projects that is the issue, but the strategic challenge of making them happen.

While Culpeper has not left any account of his life before 1640, we can infer that the 1620s were his formative years. Four phenomena from that decade stand out as context for this study. The first is the Thirty Years War (1618–48), which lasted half Culpeper’s life, and which he witnessed first-hand. The second is the accession of Charles I and the constitutional and legal tensions between the monarchy and Parliament. The third is disorder in the natural world as Britain suffered epidemics of plague and smallpox and a series of poor harvests caused by weather patterns that have been attributed to climate change.⁸ Finally, the decade saw the launch of at least one version of the scientific revolution with its offer of a new relationship with nature and much-needed social renewal.⁹

At the start of this decade, Culpeper graduated from Hart Hall (now Hertford College) in Oxford and moved to London to begin his training as a barrister. The Inns of Court had a ‘high level of political consciousness and discourse’.¹⁰ Together with Westminster, the Inns were the locus not only for the legal and political struggles of Stuart England, but also home to its greatest philosopher of science, Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Bacon became Lord Chancellor and reached the pinnacle of his political, legal, and scientific career as Culpeper moved to the Middle Temple. In October 1620, Bacon published Instauratio Magna (‘Great Renewal’), a manifesto for the scientific revolution. Bacon proposed a new science in which hypotheses would be induced from evidence gathered through experiment and observation. What we now acknowledge as the scientific method was conceived by Bacon to address humanity’s ‘deeply layered ignorance of nature’, and to restore or at least improve ‘the relation between the mind and nature.’¹¹

Bacon’s personal and professional nemesis was Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), whose career Ives describes as supremely illustrating the relationship between common lawyers, society, and the English Revolution.¹² Following Charles I’s accession in 1625, Coke began scrutinizing from Parliament the Crown’s finances, foreign policy, and religious leanings.¹³ In the Parliament of 1628, Coke led the attack on taxation without parliamentary consent, martial law, and imprisonment without cause, and it was he who conceived the Petition of Right.¹⁴ Aligned with Coke, but arguably more radical, was John Selden (1584–1654), a lawyer and historian, who was, like Culpeper, an alumnus of Hart Hall. In the early 1620s, Selden had worked with Bacon before challenging the Crown in Parliament in the latter half of the decade.¹⁵ This was a frenetic time for law and science in London and Culpeper was in the centre of events. These phenomena of the 1620s – climate, politics, war, law, and the scientific revolution – were connected in multiple ways. The thesis of the first three is that of Parker, but there are also connections between climate, law and science: for example, the rise of law and the legal profession may also have been stimulated by the climate-related famines of the 1590s and 1620s.¹⁶ This may have created favourable conditions for a lawyer like Bacon to explore science, while legal methods have been identified as a source of inspiration for the scientific method.¹⁷

By the end of the decade Culpeper had moved to The Hague, another centre of gravity for the English. While war and the effects of climate change ravaged the continent,¹⁸ Elizabeth Stuart was living in exile in the Dutch capital with her husband Frederick V (1596–1632), the Elector Palatine, whose election marked the start of the Thirty Years’ War. Known as the ‘Winter Queen’, Elizabeth was the sister of Charles I and a symbol of the struggle for Englishmen like Culpeper, who may have been one of the Middle Templars who swore allegiance to her in 1621.¹⁹ Culpeper made his way to The Hague and became Elizabeth’s trusted servant and messenger. Culpeper was knighted by Charles in 1628. The following summer, Elizabeth and Culpeper witnessed an Anglo-Dutch force successfully conducting a five-month siege of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a city in the Spanish Netherlands that was of strategic importance to the Habsburgs.²⁰ No doubt Culpeper met the English officers, commanded by Sir Horace Vere (1565–1635), and including men who led both sides in the subsequent civil war, including Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–71) and Philip Skippon (d. 1660), two architects of the New Model Army.²¹ Through these experiences, Culpeper evidently became very attached to Elizabeth. When he was ordered back to England by his father in 1631, Elizabeth appears to have secured a pension for him,²² and wrote of him that ‘I write by so sure a messenger as I dare say anything, for he is faithful and loves both the king and me, and most sore against his will and ours he leaves my service, but you know a father must be obeyed’.²³ Over a decade later, Samuel Hartlib decoded a letter from Culpeper in which the latter wrote of his continuing loyalty to Elizabeth and his willingness to serve her again.²⁴

Culpeper married and settled down in Kent in the 1630s, and we know little about this period other than some bare facts about his family and finances. When he emerges again in 1641, it is the eve of the Civil War. Culpeper had contacted Hartlib, John Dury (1596–1680), and Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670) after hearing about their reforming work in a fast-day sermon given in Parliament in November 1640.²⁵ Culpeper began a correspondence mainly with Hartlib and Dury, of which some 200 letters and other items survive from between 1641 and 1657.²⁶ There are 188 letters from Culpeper, of which 180 are from him to Hartlib. We have a few letters from Dury and others to Culpeper, but none from Hartlib to him. There are gaps in the correspondence, including no letters between 1650 and 1652. Nonetheless, the correspondence presents a vivid picture of Culpeper. He emerges as a central figure in the Hartlib circle and also as his own man, one whose formative years were the 1620s, when he was exposed to people, ideas, and events that gave him a remarkable breadth of thinking, and a determination to reconcile the many tensions in his world – whether by reform or revolution.

The laws of nature

Clucas proposes that Culpeper’s opinions on chemical matters typify those of the Hartlib circle by revealing a fascination with early modern alchemy and ‘some resistance to empirical or experimental chemical methods’.²⁷ My reading suggests that Culpeper’s interest in chemistry has two quite distinct themes: one is identifiable with the scientific method described by Bacon, which can be seen as the parent to modern chemistry; and the second is the tradition of what Clucas describes as ‘magical and esoteric writings on chemistry’ – what we might now call ‘alchemy’.²⁸ Culpeper lived within both traditions, as did many in the 1600s, including Bacon, Robert Boyle (1627–1691), Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and other members of the Hartlib circle.

Culpeper’s commitment to empirical and experimental methods is demonstrated by his interest in the works of Glauber between 1646 and 1649. The following is representative: ‘I pray by your interest at Amsterdam procure me one of Mr. Glauber’s books [about his] oven … I am very confident I can make it but shall be glad to receive the practice of it from another … ’²⁹ There are numerous other occasions in Culpeper’s correspondence where he takes a similarly experimental approach to everything from agriculture to armaments.³⁰ In one of his last letters, he tells Hartlib that ‘the best thanks I can return you for your late communication of many useful ingenuities is (after experience) to ascertain you of the reality of them, which (in my retired way) I shall (from time to time) endeavour to do’.³¹

In Culpeper’s mind this empirical approach is not inconsistent with his interest in alchemy. Clucas describes Culpeper’s experimentation as an ‘afterthought’ and his chemistry as ‘largely a literary experience’ of neo-Platonic and Protestant texts.³² Culpeper indeed devoted many years to such texts but his reading of them is directed towards his own idea of the relationship between humanity and nature. Webster suggests that Culpeper shows ‘an ability to interpret what must have been regarded as a highly technical piece of [medical] writing that he rightly regarded as of seminal importance’.³³ Culpeper’s approach is, I suggest, different from both the alchemical tradition and the emerging discipline of chemistry, but combines elements of both.

Culpeper starts from the position of his sources that ‘the true agent in nature [is] that Spirit of the Lord that (in the beginning) moved in and upon the waters’.³⁴ The true agent is therefore not an alchemical substance – but Culpeper believes that there must be something that fulfils the role of what we would call a catalyst in the process. ‘This secret of secrets some philosophers call (but improperly) the agent, not that it acts but because it excitates the true agent into action’.³⁵ It therefore ‘deserves rather to be called a patient then an agent’.³⁶ Culpeper variously considers whether this catalyst is some form of impurity or perhaps coldness, something oppositional that has the necessary stimulating effect. He leaves us no record of any experiments or other attempts to discover this catalyst. By 1649, when his correspondence about Glauber ends, Culpeper has concluded that the endless attempts of others to distil and purify substances in search of the secret of secrets is the wrong way to understand how nature works. He still ‘wonderfully admires’ Glauber’s ovens and methods, ‘But truly I must still say that this wracking of Nature is not the help that she expects from us’. He identifies that the fundamental law of nature is towards self-preservation and self-increase: these are ‘Nature’s ends in all her motions’. ‘This is achieved by a continual increase of Nature’s own vigour, and also by casting out whatever has the nature of enmity against her’. Nature’s fertility is not impeded by the presence of impurity, but depends on it. Like an immune response to a vaccine, ‘So long as there was something of an impure nature lying within her dominions, [Nature] continued in motion and action’. He concludes:

And truly it is upon these & the like consideration, (touched very sparingly in the books) that I have insisted, now these so many years, being as confidently assured that these distractions & pulling of nature to pieces, may perhaps be a means of our getting those rights which nature contains, in that simple perfection wherein we find her in all things; but that to exalt nature to the exuberance which is attributed to the philosopher’s stone; there needs only such a reincrudation as the seeds of the earth receive after their autumnal ripeness. And if (instead of these subtle manual operations), we would more observe the intentions, ways & actions of nature, we might (without cumbering ourselves about many things) more easily attain that unum necessarium, that best part, which is so much & so universally desired.³⁷

Culpeper recognizes that experimenting on nature (by ‘wracking’ and ‘pulling her to pieces’) may allow humanity to exploit her resources, but that to improve (‘exalt’) nature, we need to observe nature. Putting nature into the positive motion which causes her to self-preserve and self-generate is as simple as the return of seeds to the soil after the autumn. The stimulation for the seed’s germination is the oncoming cold weather of winter as well as the warmth of the sun. Both stimulate nature’s fertility, everything in nature cycles through the seasons and years, and everything has its use, as is further evidenced by the fact that it is the cold regions of the air which cause water vapours to precipitate back to earth and in a purer state than before.³⁸

Finally, Culpeper sees an analogy between the way nature responds to impurity and grace to sin, and his analogical mind is echoed in the reciprocity of his rhetoric.

But that which my present thoughts most run upon is that exuberancy of the spirit of nature which I find (by analogy that excellent way of enlarging knowledge) to answer in all points to the Spirit of grace … There is a spirit in nature as there is in grace … ³⁹

Culpeper may not have made pioneering discoveries in chemistry, but he saw the natural world as an organic whole while still respecting and contributing to the endeavour to investigate and understand it better.⁴⁰ Culpeper proposes three principles to guide this enterprise: first, that humanity should exercise self-restraint and humility in using its power; second, that we must observe and respect nature as a whole and examine it in experimentation that is not violent and exploitative; and third, that people and nature can only achieve their full potential by working in harmony. It may well be that Culpeper’s inspiration is born from his faith and, in particular, the idea that God and nature operate in analogous ways, but this may in fact have allowed him insights beyond the scope of his experimentation. Ultimately, the test is not whether a particular method is favoured or problematic, but whether it works.⁴¹

The most significant practical application of Culpeper’s natural philosophy was in agriculture, arguably the area in which the Hartlib circle had its greatest effect.⁴² The overall aim was ‘to continue the Baconian enterprise of the advancement of learning’, by combining alchemy, cultivation of the land, and Bacon’s experimental philosophy.⁴³ This framing perfectly describes Culpeper’s endeavours, in particular his efforts to boost soil fertility and yield. Soil fertility was the centre of agricultural thought at the time,⁴⁴ and Culpeper pursued two approaches to the subject: the first was the addition of nitrogen salts from saltpetre; the second was clover, a plant that, in modern terms, fixes atmospheric nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with soil.⁴⁵ The competition between these two methods has defined modern agriculture. The first ‘agrichemical’ approach evolved into the industrial, high-input farming system that depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and biocides which took hold after the Second World War.⁴⁶ The second ‘agroecological’ approach underpins modern organic and regenerative farming, with soil health at its heart.⁴⁷ Agroecology, in words reminiscent of Culpeper’s, ‘seeks solutions more in understanding and managing the biological realm than in the manipulation of chemical compounds’.⁴⁸

Culpeper was not alone in this work, which featured prominently in the Hartlib circle’s publications,⁴⁹ and in projects of many other members of the Hartlib circle, including Gabriel Plattes (c. 1600–44), Benjamin Worsley (1617/18–1677) and Robert Boyle. Culpeper supported Plattes’ work in 1644 and was dismayed by his premature death that year.⁵⁰ Worsley and Boyle pursued the agrichemical path, sharing ‘a keen interest in improving husbandry by means of chemistry’.⁵¹ In 1645, Culpeper backed Worsley’s project to develop a saltpetre industry in England.⁵² Webster and others have speculated that Culpeper was an inspirational force in Worsley’s project which itself may have drawn Boyle to experimental chemistry.⁵³ In 1646, Boyle wrote to Worsley about saltpetre and soil (‘adored muck’), and stating that he had discovered a ‘paradox in husbandry’.⁵⁴ Boyle does not explain the paradox but the phenomena of agriculture, and specifically soil fertility, can appear paradoxical.⁵⁵

Culpeper and others would have regarded this early agrichemical approach as natural, since saltpetre was harvested from organic waste, including from pigeons in a process that Boyle humorously describes in the same letter. Worsley’s project was founded on his proposition that saltpetre was naturally secreted by the earth. Consequently, Culpeper probably regarded saltpetre production as exalting, not wracking, nature and he also delighted in the well-established paradox that the same chemical used to make gunpowder could be used for food: ‘God will go beyond the Devil in his own materials of destruction, by changing the use of them into a blessing’.⁵⁶ Four hundred years later, the explosive factories built for the World Wars were indeed turned into the fertilizer plants that powered the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture.⁵⁷ Perhaps the founders of the green revolution also believed they were working with nature and turning swords into plough shares, but this revolution paradoxically became the ultimate war on biodiversity, human health, and now the climate.⁵⁸ It is the epitome of the ‘wracking of nature’.

The major paradox of soil fertility, however, does not lie in the agrichemical pathway but in the way that leguminous plants like clover fix nitrogen in the soil. This was the practice that began to transform English agriculture from the seventeenth century onwards.⁵⁹ Clark proposes that it was lower interest rates that allowed farmers to invest in rotations (between arable and pasture, natural or clover) that did not offer immediate returns but did build up soil health.⁶⁰ On that view, Culpeper’s advocacy of lower interest rates to stimulate investment was also creditable.⁶¹ Boyle was interested in clover, and circulated a paper on the subject in 1648, which Culpeper was very keen to read, although we do not know whether he did so.⁶² By the mid-1650s, Culpeper was recognized as an expert in clover cultivation according to a series of letters in the third edition of Hartlib’s Legacy (1655).⁶³ Culpeper also wrote about another important aspect of agroecology, which is the wider spacing of plants to give them sunlight and ground to build their root systems and express themselves.⁶⁴ By contrast, agrichemical farming raises yields by increasing plant density, which further contributes to their vulnerability to predators and disease, requiring more biocides.⁶⁵

If that surplusage of corn were rightly placed which (being all in one furrow) hindered one another; it would then happen that each grain having its gavelkind proportion of ground would not only come to good but being strong in itself & having its just depth and distance would bear that proportion which in nature might be expected from it.⁶⁶

With the right spacing and amount of ‘quintessential dung’ Culpeper could not conceive ‘why we may not expect Isaac’s increase … ’⁶⁷ For Culpeper there are deep analogies between agriculture, natural philosophy, and religion while experimental method and the laws of nature cross all boundaries, as we shall see further below.⁶⁸ These relationships appear not only in his theory but in the physical juxtaposition and development of ideas on the page:

I have a farm this year turned into my hands & would willingly make some advantage of that inconvenience by making several trials, if either in Mr. Plattes’ books or elsewhere you can inform yourself clothing corn with a rich Compost I would willingly be a learner.

But that which my present thoughts most run upon is that exuberancy of the spirit of nature which I find (by analogy, that excellent way of enlarging knowledge) to answer in all pointes to the Spirit of grace.⁶⁹

The nature of law

Culpeper captures the analogical (‘that excellent way of enlarging knowledge’) and synthetic nature of his mind when he tells Hartlib ‘my thoughts are guided by a constellation of observations, rather than by any one or a few particular reasons that deserve a name’.⁷⁰ There is a consonance between his science and his law. In science, he has both a commitment to practice and process, and an interest in ideas that may seem more abstract but are grounded in observation of the natural world. He is interested in how people can work with nature to make the world better, and in how they must exercise restraint when presented with the power to exploit. These same ideas are also present in his writings on the law. From 1641 to the end of the Civil War in 1649, Culpeper wrote about the law in over fifty letters. Culpeper’s main interests are: first, liberty of conscience and the relationship between civil and ecclesiastical governance; and, second, the constitutional rights of the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons. He also addresses procedural questions such as how the people can hold to account an all-powerful Parliament and how to reconcile conflicting opinions and resolve the disputes of the day.⁷¹

The subject that seems closest to Culpeper’s heart is liberty of conscience, which is to be expected of an Independent Puritan. During the war, Culpeper describes the Pope, the bishops, the ‘aristocratic party’, the Scots, and the Presbyterian party in Parliament as threats to liberty of conscience – and for him, all are equally antichristian. Liberty of conscience is for Culpeper a question of law as well as of ethics and faith. He writes in 1642 that ‘I every day grow stronger for an Universal Liberty of Conscience’ and he deplores the fact that every man’s ‘zeal for their own fancies’ has swallowed up Christian charity and humility, even though ‘Natural < H: Reason > The rules of Common Civility and the Lex Talionis might fully teach us to be that < H: to > others which we could wish others towards Vs’.⁷² Culpeper cites Roman law, secular ethics, and (if we accept Hartlib’s interpolation) natural reason as the justifications for the golden rule, which is intriguing as the more obvious authority for a Puritan would have been the New Testament itself. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus not only commanded that, ‘Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them’, he added: ‘for this is the law and the prophets’.⁷³ The golden rule is not merely an ethical injunction or a matter of common sense: over the past millennium it has been variously described by commentators as representing ‘natural law’,⁷⁴ ‘the whole Law’,⁷⁵ and ‘the quintessence of the law’.⁷⁶ I would suggest that it goes to the heart of Culpeper’s legal thought and perhaps that is why he seeks authority for it outside Scripture. In this he was not behaving like a lawyer. As Ibbetsen observes, while natural law may have shaped the common law, moral injunctions (such as the golden rule) themselves have not had any effect on the law in practice.⁷⁷

An example of this is how Culpeper approaches obedience to the law. In matters of conscience, Culpeper believes that people are answerable only to God and, as the conscience belongs to God, people do not even have the right to submit to another’s judgement.⁷⁸ It is analogous to the legal axiom that nemo dat qui non habet: you cannot give what you do not own. In matters of civil law, however, the opposite is true. Here obedience is a divine as well as secular mandate. ‘To the unjust judgement of a legal judge in a controversy about my estate I not only may without sin but ought upon pain of sin to submit’.⁷⁹ There is no doubt a practical aspect to this: whereas, for Culpeper, liberty of conscience amongst Protestants should pose no threat to society, civil disobedience leads to chaos. Culpeper believes absolutely in the rule of law as binding every person, including the King, equally.⁸⁰ But this is also consonant with his natural philosophy where the catalyst is a patient rather than an agent. We change the world through submission to the law and to nature, and action must always be constrained by this knowledge. Of course, this philosophy also speaks to the Puritan tension between the duty to do good works in order to redeem ourselves and the world from original sin, and our recognition that (as such efforts are not sufficient) salvation lies only in God’s grace.

How then to explain Culpeper’s support of Parliament in the Civil War and his radical rejection of the three estates model of the English constitution?⁸¹ In a letter apparently written the day after the execution of Charles I, Culpeper explains that there is a hierarchy in which authority flows from the people to Parliament and from Parliament to all the institutions of government, including the Crown. ‘I shall (without considering the circumstances of this present Parliament) say of a Parliament in General, that it was that first ordinance of man in this Kingdom by which all others were made … ’ The choice of words is significant. As ‘the first’ ordinance of man, it could not have been preceded by the creation of a monarch; and an ‘ordinance’ was the term used during the war for statutes passed without the King’s assent. Having been established, Parliament then created all the institutions of government, apparently including the king: ‘The King is no party to, but a part of, the government’.⁸² Parliament is sovereign in all matters other than those which the people, as the creators of Parliament, retain; nor may any person inferior to Parliament (including, implicitly, the King) question parliament’s proceedings.⁸³ Culpeper’s ideas in 1649 were no different to his earlier views. In 1644, he describes the House of Commons as the ‘natural mother of all Government’ and wishes that ‘there were (as at first) but one house’.⁸⁴ The terms ‘natural’ and ‘at first’ signify that Culpeper is seeking to argue from a first, natural state.⁸⁵ He expands this argument, stating that a hereditary seat in Parliament would be:

a greater inheritance then could be allotted to any 100 men at the first natural coalition, when (among the equal sons of Adam) natural abilities might per chance deserve personal honour but not hereditary power &, if I may use the dictates of my own reason, I cannot conceive that our ancestors in the first coalition either would or could bind not only themselves but all posterity, by an immutable humane [sic] law, which is a contradiction in nature & reason, to one or more fools or weak men that might be born 500 or 1,000 years after.⁸⁶

In 1647, Lady Katherine Ranelagh (1615–91), elder sister of Robert Boyle, writes to Hartlib with a set of questions of constitutional law which she asks Culpeper to resolve.⁸⁷ Culpeper muses on these in one letter, and then formally answers in another.⁸⁸ For Culpeper, these ‘lately arisen’ questions are a ‘shaking of our triple foundation’, a reference to the contest over the precise relationship and powers of the ‘three estates’ of the Commons, Lords and King.⁸⁹ According to Weston and Greenberg, it was common ground between Royalists and Parliament by this time that ‘the community was the human source of political authority in the state’, but the Royalists maintained that government was solely vested in the Crown, while Parliament’s main claim was its shared role in law-making, the principle of ‘coordination’.⁹⁰ Culpeper goes further than most in suggesting that both law-making and government belong solely to the House of Commons, as the elected representative of the people. Gone are the three estates and any coordination between them. On law-making, the King is simply unnecessary, as history has shown: ‘such Parliaments as deposed Kings could also at the same time make good Laws … ’⁹¹ On government, Culpeper questions whether the King and Lords have any prerogative powers. If they exist at all, then they must be derived ‘from the People’s consent’ (in which case the Commons as the people’s representative can dispose of them), unless they were taken by the sword, in which case they can be taken back the same way. He uses the provocative analogy that if the Spanish Armada had succeeded in 1588, the Spanish invaders could have lawfully been expelled again in 1589.⁹²

Culpeper also relies extensively on what he calls ‘the law of nature’ and we would now call ‘natural law’, the idea of fundamental law that is above, and overrides, any other source of law.⁹³ One example is where Culpeper seeks to defeat the Royalist argument that the King had acquired rights by holding them from time immemorial, based on the common law doctrine of prescription. Culpeper describes this as the ‘dark & bottomless pit of prescription where no rational means of hunting & searching the truth can be used’,⁹⁴ and observes that,

according to that little skill I have in the Law (for there can be no such thing in nature) prescription is a right which a man claims to something which can belong to no particular man by the Law of nature, & this plea is that the thing he claims is such as can appropriately belong to no man by the Law of nature, & that himself & his Ancestors have been so long possessed of it as that no memory of man or record can show the contrary … ⁹⁵

Culpeper then notes that where prescription is claimed over a piece of land, the neighbours can still claim a right of way if that way also has been enjoyed from time immemorial. Thus, he says, ‘prescription (in the nature & first human constitution of it) was not invented & set up with intent that it should stand & operate against any Law, much less against first & highest of all Law, the Law of nature’.⁹⁶

In spite of his adversarial language, Culpeper does not dismiss prescription but rather its ability to resolve the present dispute over the royal prerogative and powers. By his time, prescription was an established doctrine of English law, introduced from Roman law by Bracton; a doctrine present in many jurisdictions and with well-defined rules.⁹⁷ Culpeper ignores the fact that prescription was not used solely to justify royal privileges: it was also understood as a means to settle both private and international legal disputes and to avoid conflict over territory and other possessions.⁹⁸ Nonetheless, this one-sided approach only serves to emphasize Culpeper’s commitment to the superior position of natural law and his understanding of that concept. For Culpeper, the law of nature combines two modern terms: natural law and the laws of nature in the sense of ‘science’. Observation of nature (including humanity) is for him a source of fundamental legal principles. For example, ‘the people & their Ancestors, (as sons of Adam) were (by nature) free from either King or Lord [because] nature made no such creatures’. Not only are all men born free, but that freedom ‘belongs (by the Law of nature) equally to all the sons of Adam.’.⁹⁹

As the first and highest law, natural law must precede and override any possible claim of prescription. Thus, for Culpeper, natural law has defeated an attempt to appropriate the common law and all that is left is for the Royalists to prove that the people have granted them their claimed rights with consent and through their representative in Parliament. This is positive or political law, ‘to which (in all political coalitions) every individual person, either mediately or immediately, doth or should give his consent’.¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, the King and Lords must prove their case before the people as judge, as they were the lawmaker.¹⁰¹ This follows from two rules which Culpeper regards as ‘the highest maxims of our Law & of reason’, and also attributes to ‘the Law of reason’.¹⁰² The maxims are that no one can be judge in their own cause and that whoever makes the law may interpret it.¹⁰³

Culpeper was not alone among his contemporaries in his commitment to natural law,¹⁰⁴ or his use of it in such arguments.¹⁰⁵ Culpeper’s writings on natural law and reason in the common law draw on the long common law tradition.¹⁰⁶ But in seeking the abolition of the Lords, regarding the King as the product of the people and their representative, and comparing the people to God, Culpeper is outside the mainstream. He is also distinguishable from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in rejecting any idea that the people have collectively entered into a binding contract with the monarch for their own safety, since the people (through their representative, the House of Commons) have a unilateral and unconditional right to dispose not only of the monarch, but the monarchy; and to dispose of their representative in annual elections. For the same reason, Culpeper never writes about the King’s duty to rule well or for the safety of the people, even in the limited way that Hobbes would: there is simply no contract.¹⁰⁷ Remarkably, Culpeper is not promoting law as what Cromartie calls ‘a science of the common weal’, even though his non-legal topics could almost perfectly be captured in that phrase.¹⁰⁸ But the experience of the war does give him a rather ‘Hobbesian’ understanding that the decisive factor in the constitution is who controls the army – and he wants that power vested solely in the Commons.¹⁰⁹ Culpeper is not, however, blind to the dangers of such a powerful body: he is a proponent of annual Parliamentary elections even before the Levellers,¹¹⁰ and also investigates ballot boxes and other features of the Venetian republic designed to promote integrity in the democratic process.¹¹¹

As regards customary law, Culpeper joins those arguing that the coronation oath binds the King to enforce all future laws and not only those already enacted, which turns on the meaning of the phrase quas vulgus eligerit.¹¹² But he observes that ‘Do but settle the sword … we shall not need to fight upon a grammatical question whether Eligerit be the preter perfect or future tense … ’¹¹³ Culpeper cites the Kentish customary alternative to primogeniture, known as ‘gavelkind’, whereby all male heirs shared the inheritance rather than it all going to the eldest: but he does so in relation to church governance and agriculture. So, ‘one requirement of public prayer is that every present member should have a gavelkind share’ in it,¹¹⁴ while corn seed should be evenly and widely spaced so that each seed can have its ‘gavelkind proportion of ground’.¹¹⁵ Culpeper takes what he would regard as an egalitarian legal principle, derived from the equality of ‘the sons of Adam’ in nature, and applies it by analogy in other fields. For Culpeper, law, nature, and reason are one and the same. And it is Culpeper’s analogical mind that catalyses his rhetorical style when writing about the law as it did in chemistry. With chemistry it was the analogy between nature and grace, in law it is the analogy of creation itself:

Thus have I proved the People (in all political creations) to be (with reverence may I speak it) like God in the creation of the world; in whom (as the creatures in God) all our political creatures (be they as proud as Lucifer) must acknowledge themselves to live & move & have their continual being, except (like Lucifer) they will deserve to be cast out of the political heaven.¹¹⁶

It is doubtful whether the supremacy of the people and their representative could be stated in higher terms than these. That Culpeper was absolutely committed to the Parliamentary cause is not surprising.¹¹⁷ What is instructive is that a man so committed to tolerance, the rule of law, respect for private property, and to the potential for enterprise and science to accomplish the reform of society, could ultimately have concluded that revolution alone could bring about the regeneration that he regarded as necessary.

Reform or revolution?

Culpeper’s commitment to regeneration through reform is evident from his own letters and the comments of others. His active participation in the various projects of the Hartlib circle, including the Office of Address and Chelsea College, is well documented.¹¹⁸ The projects that appear to have resonated most strongly with him tend to concern method: they answer the question how (quomodo)? rather than what (quod)? Method was, of course, important for the Hartlib circle.¹¹⁹ For Culpeper, it is a problem that seems at times agonizing because of his desire to try things out himself and, once proved, to be adopted by others for the public good. After praising the indexing idea discussed below, he exclaims ‘But what profit is it? Yea what grief is it to know the quoddity only, of these and many other inventions, but to be without any hope of the quomodo of them?’¹²⁰ This theme of method is a ‘meta-problem’ that overarches and unifies the topics that interest him. Perhaps it can be stated as a chain of logic in the process of reform that leads from discovery of ideas through to action, with the following steps: (1) how do we analyse texts and other materials so as to identify the essential truths in them (2) how do we reproduce such information (3) how do we access it efficiently (4) how do we communicate it (5) how do we put it into action for the benefit of society?

Culpeper fixes on analysis in an early letter after John Dury has claimed a method of textual analysis that allows the reader to ‘comprehend all the wisdom of the writer’ in ‘the scriptures or other authors’. The ‘best examples whether divine or humane are the nearest way to wisdom’, so the analysis of their ideas will enable him ‘better to direct my own words & actions’.¹²¹ Analysis has deeply practical benefits for society and the individual, notably in helping to resolve doubts and disputes in science, law and religion, by allowing the parties to identify the facts and the fundamental principles which they would then be expected to agree on. Culpeper cites the potential benefits in his own scientific endeavours,¹²² in Dury’s efforts to negotiate peace amongst the Protestant churches,¹²³ and even to demonstrate the treason of the King’s advisors.¹²⁴ Again, Culpeper’s Puritanism no doubt informs the importance of a direct reading of the written word – but this applies universally and not just from Scripture and in matters of faith.

Culpeper’s own method aims often to identify not the answer, but the question (or ‘query’), on the basis that ‘if the most pertinent matters of Law, reason, & of Fact … were by way of Quæres concentrated into the narrow room of a printed sheet of paper, it would become a yet more irresistible light … ’ and might convince at least reasonable people on both sides of the argument.¹²⁵ Given the power of this method to guide action and resolve the disputes at the heart of the Civil War, Culpeper pursued Dury for his method for years. But whatever materials Dury provided did not satisfy Culpeper’s needs nor his sense of what Dury had promised.¹²⁶

On the reproduction, accessing, and communication of information, several of Culpeper’s letters put forward his own ideas or express enthusiasm for the ideas of others. He often reserves judgement, however, for example regarding the great project of universal language, on which he has mixed views. In 1646, he describes it as ‘a means of conversation between all the nations of the world’ but in 1657 it is ‘one of the things of naught’.¹²⁷ He develops a form of short-hand to be used in simplifying printed texts and making them cheaper and therefore more accessible.¹²⁸ He also describes a form of telecommunication or ‘linea visibilis, by which friends one hundred or more miles apart may converse, in a minute’.¹²⁹ Culpeper is alert to the problem of accessing information in the new information age, for which he sees a solution in a novel system of indexing:

And truly, to apply every ingenuity to its proper end, and to find for every end its proper means, and to multiply the complications and immeations of every thought or thing that shall from time to time emerge, I know no better engine … than Mr. Harrison’s way of indexing. In the extensive use whereof, my raw thoughts can sooner lose themselves than comprehend it.¹³⁰

Culpeper can see the potential of a repository of practical ideas and information (the Office of Address) accessed instantaneously from afar via the linea visibilis, and using Harrison’s system to direct queries to the right documents.¹³¹ This idea (which has all the ingredients of the internet) of the technological means to connect people so that they could work collaboratively for the common good,¹³² ‘will hardly let me sleep’.¹³³

The final step in this chain of reform is, however, the most challenging. Having access to relevant knowledge does not mean that people will act on it – more is required. Hence, he advises Hartlib not to ‘bury himself’ in Oxford, as the University ‘will finally prove to be far below your aims, which are to order men, not books’.¹³⁴ Culpeper identifies numerous barriers to reform, all of which apply equally today: finding the funding to prove risky projects,¹³⁵ obtaining Parliamentary support and legislation,¹³⁶ while also appreciating the benefits of private over public patronage,¹³⁷ vested interests,¹³⁸ the desire of entrepreneurs to protect their intellectual property (‘hugging’ their ideas to themselves) and expecting both ‘profit and honour’,¹³⁹ high interest rates that discourage investment,¹⁴⁰ and the need to protect private interests while promoting the public good.¹⁴¹ Some of these are structural or institutional barriers, but most relate to the complexity of human nature. Culpeper tries to see the best in people,¹⁴² but he is often disappointed.

Two aspects of human nature stand out. The first is the way in which people unnecessarily limit themselves: ‘truly there is nothing I fear so much as the making our present thoughts Herculean pillars & ne plus ultra’s to our endeavours … ’¹⁴³ This may be a reference to the frontispiece of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna, which shows a ship sailing through the Pillars of Hercules, above the Latin motto Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia.¹⁴⁴ Bacon himself had written that ‘the greatest obstacle to the progress of the sciences … lies in men’s lack of hope and in the assumption that it is impossible’.¹⁴⁵ The second problem is people’s desire to have more than they need. ‘With everyone having enough, superfluity may be a care and burden, not an advantage of honour or pleasure’.¹⁴⁶ Taxes should be imposed on luxury items so that ‘the rich or vain man only shall bear the burden’ while ‘those who are either poor, or if rich yet so sober as to live to, or near the necessity of nature, shall go scot free’.¹⁴⁷ Each should apply their talents so that everyone may enjoy.

that abundance which more communication of ingenuities would produce; and of that innocence, which abundance of all things would bring into the world, when all should have enough, and all beyond that, would prove a burden, and little or no advantage.¹⁴⁸

If people could simultaneously open their minds to what is possible, while limiting their desire for wealth to what they need, the regeneration of society would be secure, its foundation ‘a happy levelling’.¹⁴⁹ The ‘necessity of nature’ is the perfect balance where each individual gives what they can and receives what they need such that none is disadvantaged by having too little or too much. This balance is also the unum necessarium described in Culpeper’s chemical philosophy which can be attained by observing nature and by not encumbering ourselves with the ‘many things’ that lie within our grasp but are a distraction.¹⁵⁰

But Culpeper does not, in the end, believe that human nature can change in this way. The King, the Lords, the Bishops, and the holders of monopolies will insist on retaining their excessive power and wealth – assets to which neither the law nor nature nor the interests of the commonwealth entitle them. Consequently, in spite of the theoretical possibility of regeneration through voluntary reforms, it can only be achieved through revolution. Culpeper portrays a world put into in motion as the chemist puts nature into motion: ‘the stone will not leave rolling and the work of God will advance, either by, or upon those that interest themselves in it’.¹⁵¹ With sixteen references to Babylon in letters written during the Civil War, the image is violent and apocalyptic:¹⁵²

Believe it: now we are pulling down such monopolies, we shall startle a great many which still lie hidden in the bushes. But the great monopoly [of the King’s power] must first be pulled down. Then the monopoly of trade, the monopoly of equity […] and the monopoly of matters of conscience and scripture – a very notable monopoly. All these and many more we shall have in the chase, and what one hound misses another will happen on the scent of. And thus will Babylon tumble, tumble, tumble, tumble.¹⁵³

Whereas nature is not to be wracked, human institutions are fair game. The Lords are ‘brats of Babylon [who] must be dashed against the stones’.¹⁵⁴ The establishment of King, Bishops, and Lords is to be cut into pieces and ‘quartered’ ready to be cooked, devoured by birds of prey: ‘all this is nothing but fitting them, first for the spit, and then for the trencher, from there to the mouth, and so to the guts, and from there – you know what will become of all these our benefactors.¹⁵⁵ We should note, however, that Culpeper’s violent rhetoric here contrasts with the ‘mild’ and ‘reconciliatory’ approach he took towards royalists in Kent when he was given power over them at the end of the war.¹⁵⁶ Although a revolutionary, perhaps he succeeded in exemplifying the self-restraint he urged on others.

Nonetheless, in the letters of the Civil War years from 1641 to 1649, Culpeper makes it clear that even if reform might take place over time, there is no time. In one letter Culpeper reveals his view that the world has only a few years in which to reform itself.¹⁵⁷ The sense of urgency is palpable and animates the wartime correspondence. Finally, as the revolution reaches its climax with the execution of Charles I, Culpeper describes the moment not as a ‘time of crisis’, but as a ‘crisis of time’.¹⁵⁸

Conclusions

‘Our resolution must be to plant to posterity, though we ourselves may not perhaps hope to enjoy any other part or fruit of the action than to have done it’.¹⁵⁹

As bad as the crises of the seventeenth century were, they did not directly or immediately bring about the apocalyptic climax that Culpeper and others anticipated. The paradox of Culpeper’s words quoted above is that today’s crises (of global warming, habitat destruction, and zoonotic diseases)¹⁶⁰ were caused by technological advances promoted in response to the crises of Culpeper’s times. In a world suffering disease, climate change, conflict, and displacement, Culpeper and his circle sought to regenerate society through science and technology. Their most practical and lasting ‘planting to posterity’ was in agriculture, where they helped launch both the agrichemical approach that defines modern industrial agriculture, and the agroecological alternative that offers a way out of the present crises of climate, biodiversity, health, and food.¹⁶¹ Unknowingly, Culpeper helped create a fork in the path, with agrichemicals one way and agroecology the other. Three centuries later, the agrichemical industry would move to take over agriculture, laying waste to the countryside, biodiversity, soil, air, and water quality, and human health.¹⁶²

The law is one means by which people have sought to stop this ineluctable destruction of the natural world, which is also teh human habitat.¹⁶³ In so doing, the law has to work with science to produce evidence of these phenomena, their effects on plaintiffs, and their causation by defendants.¹⁶⁴ Lawyers rely on principles of civil and common law as well as constitutional and human rights. This jurisprudence is traceable to the civil law tradition and its natural law principles that Culpeper regarded as identifiable with the laws of nature.¹⁶⁵ While natural law and the laws of nature have diverged in the intervening years, there is now a need to reconcile them. If the law is to be effective in stopping the self-destruction of the human species, then it needs both a doctrinal basis for making that illegal, and the science to prove the case.¹⁶⁶ Natural law provides the former, the laws of nature the latter.

Even if Culpeper did not anticipate the specific pathway that technology and science would take, he did foresee that there was a need to act with restraint and to spare nature the wracking that would be technologically possible. The laws of nature need to be respected and protected at all costs. They provide the foundations for human life and the materials from which life can be improved. By observing nature, people can identify what they really need to flourish, and how to realize those things, building a more equal society in which both people and nature can reach their full potential. In this, Culpeper’s natural philosophy and his legal thought are as one: the laws of nature are the source of regeneration.

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.