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John Selden (16 December 1584 – 30 November 1654) was an English jurist, a scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution. and scholar of Jewish law.. He was known as a polymath; John Milton hailed Selden in 1644 as "the chief of learned men reputed in this land".
His father, also named John Selden, had a small farm. It is said that his skill as a violin-player was what attracted his wife, Margaret, who was from a better family, being the only child of Thomas Baker of Rustington and descended from a knightly family of Kent. Selden was educated at the free grammar school at Chichester, The Prebendal School, and in 1600 he went on to Hart Hall, Oxford. In 1603, he was admitted to Clifford's Inn, London; in 1604 he moved to the Inner Temple; and in 1612 he was called to the bar. His earliest patron was Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, the antiquary, who seems to have employed him to copy and summarise some of the parliamentary records then held at the Tower of London. For some reason, Selden very rarely practised in court, but his practice in barristers' chambers as a conveyancer and consulting counsel was large and apparently lucrative.
This all seems to have caused Selden's entry into politics. Although he was not in the Parliament of England, he was the instigator and perhaps the draughtsman of the Protestation of 1621 on the rights and privileges of the House, affirmed by the House of Commons on 18 December 1621. He and several others were imprisoned, at first in the Tower and later under the charge of Sir Robert Ducie, sheriff of London. During his brief detention, he occupied himself in preparing an edition of medieval historian Eadmer's History from a manuscript lent to him by his host or jailor, which he published two years afterwards.
In 1628 he was returned to the third parliament of Charles for Ludgershall, Wiltshire, and was involved in drawing up and carrying the Petition of Right. In the session of 1629 he was one of the members responsible for the tumultuous passage in the House of Commons of the resolution against the illegal levy of tonnage and poundage, and, along with Sir John Eliot, Denzil Holles, Long, Valentine, William Strode, and the rest, he was sent back to the Tower. There he remained for eight months, deprived for a part of the time of the use of books and writing materials. He was then removed, under less rigorous conditions, to the Marshalsea, until William Laud arranged for him to be freed. Some years before, he had been appointed steward to Henry Grey, 8th Earl of Kent, to whose seat, Wrest in Bedfordshire, he now retired.
He was not elected to the Short Parliament of 1640; but to the Long Parliament, summoned in the autumn, he was returned without opposition for Oxford University. He opposed the resolution against episcopacy which led to the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords, and printed an answer to the arguments used by Sir Harbottle Grimston on that occasion. He joined in the protestation of the Commons for the maintenance of the Protestant religion according to the doctrines of the Church of England, the authority of the Crown, and the liberty of the subject. He was equally opposed to the court on the question of the commissions of lieutenancy of array and to the parliament on the question of the militia ordinance. In the end, he supported Parliament against King Charles, because, according to him, Charles was certainly acting illegally; but Selden was not certain if Parliament was doing the same.Glen Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (1992), p. 95.
In 1643 he participated in the discussions of the Westminster Assembly, where his Erastian views were opposed by George Gillespie.Francis J. Bremer, Tom Webster. Puritans and Puritanism in Europe and America: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia (2006), p. 105. Selden's allies included Thomas Coleman, John Lightfoot, and Bulstrode Whitelocke.
In October 1643 Selden was appointed by Commons to take control of the office of Clerk and Keeper of the Records in the Tower, which duty passed to the Master of the Rolls in 1651. In 1645, he was named one of the parliamentary commissioners of the admiralty and was elected master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, an office that he declined to accept. In 1646, he subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant and, in 1647, was voted GBP5000 (£ in ) by the parliament as compensation for his pains under the monarchy.
In 1615, the Analecton Anglobritannicon, an account of the civil administration of England before the Norman Conquest, written in 1607, was published; its title and argument imitated the Franco-Gallia of François Hotman.Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (1999), p. 85. In 1616 appeared notes on John Fortescue's De laudibus legum Angliae and Ralph de Hengham's Summae magna et parva.Michael Lapidge, Malcolm R. Godden, Simon Keynes, Anglo-Saxon England (2000), p. 250.
In 1618 his controversial History of Tithes was published. A first sign of the coming storm was the 1619 book controverting Selden, Sacrilege Sacredly Handled in two parts; with an Appendix, answering some objections by James Sempill. Selden hit back, but was soon gagged. The churchmen Richard Tillesley (1582–1621) ( Animadversions upon M. Seldens History of Tithes, 1619) and Richard Montagu ( Diatribae upon the first part of the late History of Tithes, 1621) attacked the work.Charles John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (1992), p. 100. There were further replies by William Sclater ( The Quaestion of Tythes Revised, 1623), and by Stephen Nettles ( Answer to the Jewish Part of Mr. Selden's History of Tithes 1625). In it Selden tried to demonstrate that tithing depended on the civil law, rather than canon law. He also made much of the complexities of the ancient Jewish customs on tithes.Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (2005), p. 47. The work was also a milestone in the history of English historical writing through its mixture of antiquarian-philological scholarship with historical narrative, two approaches to the study of the past previously seen as distinct.
In 1623 he produced an edition of Eadmer's Historia Novarum. It was notable for including in appendices information from the Domesday Book, which at the time had not been published and could only be consulted in the original at Westminster, on the payment of a fee.David C. Douglas, English Scholars (1939), p. 171.
He published in 1642 Privileges of the Baronage of England when they sit in Parliament and Discourse concerning the Rights and Privileges of the Subject. In 1652 he wrote a preface and collated some of the manuscripts for Roger Twysden Historiae Anglicanae scriptores X.
In 1628, at the suggestion of Sir Robert Cotton, Selden compiled, with the assistance of two other scholars, Patrick Young and Richard James, a catalogue of the Arundel marbles.
During the progress of the constitutional conflict, he was absorbed in research, publishing De jure naturali et gentium juxta disciplinam Ebraeorum in 1640. It was a contribution to the theorising of the period on natural law. In the words of John Milton, this "volume of naturall & national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service & assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest." via Google Books It develops into a theory of international law, taking as its basis the Seven Laws of Noah.Mark W. Janis, Religion and International Law (1999), pp. 68–9.
In 1644, he published Dissertatio de anno civili et calendario reipublicae Judaicae, in 1646 his treatise on marriage and divorce among the Jews entitled Uxor Ebraica, and in 1647 the earliest printed edition of the old English law-book Fleta. In 1650 Selden began to print the trilogy he planned on the Sanhedrin, as the first part of De synedriis et prefecturis juridicis veterum Ebraeorum through the press, the second and third parts being severally published in 1653 and 1655. The aim of this work was to counter the use by the Presbyterians, in particular, of arguments and precedents drawn from Jewish tradition; it was a very detailed study aimed at refuting such arguments, and pointing out the inherent flexibility of the tradition that was being cited.Johann Somerville, Hobbes, Selden, Erastianism and the history of the Jews, pp. 168–9, in Graham Alan John Rogers, Tom Sorell, Hobbes and History (2000).
The circumstances of its delayed publication, in 1635, suggest that during the early 1630s Selden inclined towards the court rather than the popular party and even secured the personal favour of the king, Charles I. It had been written sixteen or seventeen years earlier, but for political reasons Charles's predecessor, James I, had prohibited its publication. When it eventually appeared, a quarter of a century after Mare liberum, it was under Charles's royal patronage, as a kind of state paper, and with a dedication to him. The fact that Selden was not retained in the great case of ship money in 1637 by John Hampden, the cousin of Sir Edmund, his former client in the Five Knights' Case, may be taken as additional evidence that his zeal for the popular cause was neither so warm nor so unquestioned as it had once been.
His last publication was a vindication of himself from certain charges advanced against him and his Mare clausum around 1653 by Theodore Graswinckel, a Dutch jurist.
He was sceptical of the legend of King Arthur as it had grown up, but believed Arthur had existed.Rodney Castleden, King Arthur: The Truth Behind the Legend (2003), p. 49. The Druids, he suggested in comments on Poly-Olbion, were ancient and presumed esoteric thinkers. The popular image of a Druid descends via a masque of Inigo Jones from a reconstruction by Selden, based (without good foundations) on ancient German statuary.
He is also commemorated in place-names in Salvington, including "The John Selden Inn", which purports to be on the site of his dwelling; Selden Road; and the Selden medical centre. Also The Selden Arms on Lyndhurst Road in Worthing.
By about 1640, Selden's views (with those of Grotius) had a large impact on the Great Tew circle around Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland: William Chillingworth, Dudley Digges, Henry Hammond.Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (1993), pp. 272–4. It was in this milieu that Selden met and befriended Thomas Hobbes. They had much in common, in political thought, but the precise connections have not been clarified.A. P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (2003), p. 381.
Richard Cumberland followed Selden over both Grotius and Hobbes on natural law. Selden contested the scholastic position, after Cicero, that "right reason" could by its dictates alone generate moral obligation, by claiming that a formal obligation required a superior in authority. In his De legibus Cumberland rejects Selden's solution by means of the Noahide laws, in De jure naturali, in favour of Selden's less developed alternate solution. The latter is more orthodox for a Thomist, an intellectus agens as a natural faculty in the rational soul, by the mediation of which divine intellect can intervene directly with individuals.Jon Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae (1999), pp. 61–4. Matthew Hale tried to merge the theory of Grotius on property with Selden's view on obligation.Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1981), p. 162. Cumberland and Hale both belonged to a larger group, followers in a broad sense of Selden, with backgrounds mostly of Cambridge and the law, comprising also Orlando Bridgeman, Hezekiah Burton, John Hollings, Richard Kidder, Edward Stillingfleet, John Tillotson, and John Wilkins.Jon Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae (1999), pp. 26–8.
Giambattista Vico called Grotius, Selden and Samuel Pufendorf the "three princes" of the "natural right of the gentes". He went on to criticise their approach foundationally.Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (translators), The New Science of Giambattista Vico (1970 edition), section 493 at p. 123; translation revised by replacing "law" with a faithful rendering of " diritto" as "right". In his Autobiography he specifies that they had conflated the natural law of the "nations", based on custom, with that of the philosophers, based on human abstractions.Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (translators), The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (1975 edition), p. 172. Isaiah Berlin comments on Vico's admiration for Grotius and Selden.Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (1997 edition), p. 118.
Many manuscripts relate to Selden's study of the law both in England and internationally. These include
Beyond manuscripts, the Selden collection contains several notable printed works. Among them is the first book ever printed in Japan using moveable type, Sanctos no gosagueo no uchi nuqigaqi (Arch.b.f.69). The printed books included in the Selden collection contain many that are significant in part because they originated in the libraries of other famous figures, including Sir Robert Cotton, John Donne, and John Dee. According to Geoffrey Keynes, several of the books Selden received from John Donne's library include inscriptions from both men. One such book is Theodore Beza's Tractatio de polygamia, which includes Donne's signature and motto ("Per Rachel ho servitor, & non per Lea"), as well as Selden's motto ("περί παντός τήν έλευθερίαν", "Freedom above all things").
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