Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Characterizing a legal–intellectual culture: Bacon, Coke, and seventeenth-century England

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Cliometrica Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

A characterization of the ideas of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, two preeminent English lawyer-scholars, provides insights into the nature of the legal–intellectual culture of early seventeenth-century England. This emerging culture remains underexplored, even though it immediately preceded and provided essential input into the ‘culture of growth,' the eighteenth-century cultural paradigm viewed as a catalyst for England's historically unprecedented technological advance and economic growth. To develop insights, we employ a methodology not previously used in this context, applying structural topic modeling to a large corpus comprising the works of both Bacon and Coke. Estimated topics span legal, political, scientific, and methodological themes. Legal topics evidence an advanced structure of common-law thought, straddling ostensibly disparate areas of the law. Interconnections between topics reveal a distinctive approach to the pursuit of knowledge, embodying Bacon's epistemology and Coke's legal methodology. A key similarity between Bacon and Coke overshadows their differences: both sought to build reliable knowledge based on generalizing from particulars. The resulting methodological paradigm can be understood as reflecting a legacy of common-law thought and constituting a key contribution to the era's emerging legal–intellectual culture. More generally, our analysis illustrates how machine learning applied to primary texts can aid in exploration of culture.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. As Gutmann et al. (2018: 283): emphasize: ‘Textual data in various forms can provide insight into what past economic actors thought…. Textual corpora provide economic historians with a new quantitative approach to questions sometimes addressed in a more narrative style.’

  2. This trial-and-error style was similar to the use of systematic observation and experimentation that had taken root among the practicing artisans, mechanics, and workers of Elizabethan London (Harkness 2007; Hill 1997: 16).

  3. In Holdsworth's (1938: 134) words: ‘What Shakespeare has been to literature, what Bacon has been to philosophy, what the translators of the authorized version of the Bible have been to religion, Coke has been to the public and private law of England.’

  4. We present here the story that is standard in the historical literature. In a recent historical account, Baker (2017) suggests that Coke was already starting to develop his views on the supremacy of the common law while serving as Attorney General. The story that we present is nevertheless the ‘typical historian's verdict’ (Baker 2017: 357).

  5. One notable exception was Calvin's case, still influential in citizenship law, where there was much similarity in the positions of Coke, as the Chief Justice of Common Pleas, and Bacon as the King's Solicitor General (Hart 2003: 88).

  6. See https://www.structuraltopicmodel.com for a list of published applications of STM.

  7. Specifically, Roberts et al. (2014: Online Appendix) demonstrate that the STM-estimated effects always closely match the true effects, while the two-stage LDA approach often produces estimates featuring incorrect signs. Furthermore, by virtue of incorporating metadata information into topic estimation, STM estimates of covariate effects have smaller confidence intervals than those of LDA estimates. Using permutation analysis, Roberts et al. (2014: Online Appendix) also show that STM-based incorporation of metadata into topic estimation does not introduce spurious relationships between topic prevalences and metadata covariates.

  8. We restrict the FREX words to those used with some frequency in order not to focus on unusual words that are used once in a document. Our choice of FREX words is characterized by a frequency to exclusivity ratio of 0.25 (see Roberts et al. 2016b).

  9. In the preface to Coke's fourth reports.

  10. In the preface to Coke's third reports.

  11. In ‘A Proposition Touching the Compiling and Amendment of the Lawes of England.’

  12. In the preface to Bacon's Maxims.

  13. In the first volume of Coke's Institutes.

  14. The tenth report's preface states: ‘This part containeth a true and just Report…to avoid that, which venerable Verity [truth] doth blush at for fear, that is, that she which is the Foundation of Justice should not be hidden and unknown. Neither is she pleased, when once she is found out and revealed to be called into argument and question'd again, as if she were not in Verity indeed.’

  15. It is not surprising that the form of argumentation should be important to the two authors in these substantive areas. Religion was at the fulcrum of English politics throughout the two centuries in which Bacon and Coke lived. Debate about religious issues was becoming more open and more intertwined with the law as the common-law courts wrested jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical courts. But such debate was risky, with blasphemy still a capital offense; therefore focusing on details of the method of argumentation would be a safer strategy than articulating one's convictions.

  16. ‘An Essay of a King.’

  17. ‘A Letter Of Advice Written By Sr Francis Bacon To The Duke Of Buckingham.’

  18. This is the topic that is most prominent in The New Atlantis. The topic has no connection to the organization of science, the interpretation most often associated with that work (Sargent 1996).

  19. In ‘The Felicity Of Queen Elizabeth.’

  20. The naming of these two topics is the same as that in Grajzl and Murrell (2019), which focuses only on Bacon but uses the same corpus of Bacon's works as in this paper.

  21. For example, that used for the Journal of Economic Literature (https://www.aeaweb.org/jel/guide/jel.php) or by LexisNexis (https://www.lexisnexis.com/LegalNewsRoom/lexis-hub/b/legaltoolbox/posts/area-of-law-research).

  22. The literature on Bacon's influence most often emphasizes four contributions. As in Grajzl and Murrell (2019), STM finds two of these, the inductive logic of interpreting the world (Epistemology) and the focus on cataloging the world (Probing for Facts). See, for example, Peltonen (1996), Rossi 1996), and Malherbe (1996). STM does not find any emphasis on the utilitarian value of produced knowledge or on centralized organizational arrangements for scientific investigation. See, for example, Rossi (1968), Gaukroger (2001), Mokyr (2005, 2010), Sargent (1996), and Harkness (2007).

  23. The data-generating model implies that if all data were random, the correlation between topics would be -0.0417. Figure 2 captures the 11.3% of highest-valued correlations.

  24. See Heckscher (1935) and Hill (1965) for such a characterization of Coke. In contrast, Malament (1967) rejects the characterization of Coke as proponent of laissez-faire.

  25. Grajzl and Murrell (2019) examine the genesis of Bacon's scientific methodology and provide quantitative evidence of the common-law origins of Bacon's epistemological thought. The results in Fig. 2 are consistent with that evidence in that use of Epistemology co-occurs with the use of Religion, Law, & Truth. In Fig. 2, Epistemology is also connected to Civic Knowledge, a finding suggestive of the influence of Renaissance humanism on Bacon's epistemological ideas (see Gaukroger 2001). Analysis of overlapping vocabulary between topic pairs reveals that the connection between Epistemology and Religion, Law, & Truth is stronger than the connection between Epistemology and Civic Knowledge. This suggests that any influence of Bacon's background in Renaissance humanism on his epistemological reasoning was weaker than the influence of his immersion in common law. Detailed evidence supporting this point is available upon request from the authors.

  26. In contrast, the vertical position of a word is random and carries no substantive interpretation.

  27. There is an important lacuna in the methodological literature on STM that is relevant at this point. There is no agreement on whether divergent opinions on a given subject will inevitably result in differences across authors in the prevalences of the topics relevant to that subject, or whether authors could have similar topic prevalences and yet still feature substantively divergent opinions. The former seems to be the dominant view in practical applications of STM. Examples can be found in Tingley (2017), Lynam (2016), Farrell (2015), Reich et al. (2015), and Tvinnereim and Fløttum (2015). If we took this point of view, then the results presented in the ensuing section would imply that Bacon and Coke had substantively similar views on many aspects of law, for example. But given the methodological lacuna, we do not jump to this stronger conclusion.

  28. The only other communication form that both Bacon and Coke used extensively was essays, but this category includes such a heterogeneous collection of documents that conditioning on essays does not yield any new insights beyond reducing some of the unconditional differences by a small amount.

  29. This point harks back to the second, methodological, paragraph of Sect. 6. In an area in which it is beyond dispute that Bacon and Coke had profound differences, these differences do clearly result in STM estimating two separate topics in the same subject area (King, Law, & Nation and Constitutional Law).

References

  • Acemoglu D, Robinson JA (2012) Why nations fail: the origins of power, prosperity, and poverty. Crown Publishers, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Alesina A, Giuliano P (2015) Culture and institutions. J Econ Lit 53(4):898–944

    Google Scholar 

  • Algan Y, Cahuc P (2010) Inherited trust and growth. Am Econ Rev 100(5):2060–2092

    Google Scholar 

  • Allen RC (2009) The British industrial revolution in global perspective. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker J (2019) An introduction to English legal history, 5th edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker J (2017) The reinvention of Magna Carta 1216–1616. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker JH (1971) New light on Slade's case. Camb Law J 29(1):51–67

    Google Scholar 

  • Moore BJ (1966) Social origins of dictatorship and democracy: lord and peasant in the making of the modern world. Beacon Press, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Barro RJ, McCleary RM (2003) Religion and economic growth across countries. Am Sociol Rev 68(5):760–781

    Google Scholar 

  • Berman HJ (1994) The origins of historical jurisprudence: Coke, Selden, Hale. Yale Law J 103(7):1651–1738

    Google Scholar 

  • Blaydes L, Grimmer J, McQueen A (2018) Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: advice on the art of governance in the medieval Christian and Islamic worlds. J Polit 80(4):1150–1167

    Google Scholar 

  • Blei DM (2012) Probabilistic topic models. Commun ACM 55(4):77–84

    Google Scholar 

  • Blei DM, Ng AY, Jordan MI (2003) Latent Dirichlet allocation. J Mach Learn Res 3:993–1022

    Google Scholar 

  • Bowles S, Gintis H (2011) A cooperative species: human reciprocity and its evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Burch CN (1928) The rivals. Va Law Rev 14(7):507–525

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark G (2009) A farewell to alms: a brief economic history of the world. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Coquillette DR (1992) Francis Bacon. Stanford University Press, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Coquillette DR (2004) The Anglo-American legal heritage, introductory materials, 2nd edn. Carolina Academic Press, Durham

    Google Scholar 

  • Cromartie A (1995) Sir Matthew Hale, 1609–1676: law, religion and natural philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Cromartie A (1999) The constitutionalist revolution: the transformation of political culture in early Stuart England. Past Present 163:76–120

    Google Scholar 

  • Cromartie A (2006) The constitutionalist revolution: an essay on the history of England, 1450–1642. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • De Montpensier RLS (1968) Bacon as lawyer and jurist. ARSP Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 54(4):449–483

    Google Scholar 

  • Dittmar J, Seabold S (2016) Media, markets, and radical ideas: evidence from the protestant reformation. Unpublished manuscript

  • Farrell J (2015) Corporate funding and ideological polarisation about climate change. Proc Natl Acad Sci 113(1):92–97

    Google Scholar 

  • Floud R, McCloskey DN (eds) (1994) The economic history of Britain since 1700, vol 1: 1700–1860. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Friedrich CJ (1958) The philosophy of law in historical perspective. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Gardner WA (1916) Bacon's lost rules and decisions. Am Law Rev 50:536–553

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaukroger S (2001) Francis Bacon and the transformation of early-modern philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Gaukroger S (2006) The emergence of a scientific culture. Science and the shaping of modernity, 1210–1685. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Gest JM (1909) The writings of Sir Edward Coke. Yale Law J 18(7):504–532

    Google Scholar 

  • Gentzkow M, Kelly BT, Taddy M (2019) Text as data. J Econ Lit 57:535–574

    Google Scholar 

  • Gallagher RJ, Reagan AJ, Danforth CM, Dodds PS (2018) Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. PLoS ONE 13(4):e0195644. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195644

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gomaa WH, Fahmy AA (2013) A survey of text similarity approaches. Int J Comput Appl 68(13):13–18

    Google Scholar 

  • Grajzl P, Murrell P (2016) A Darwinian theory of institutional development two centuries before Darwin. J Econ Behav Organ 131(A):346–372

    Google Scholar 

  • Grajzl P, Murrell P (2019) Toward understanding 17th century English culture: a structural topic model of Francis Bacon's ideas. J Comp Econ 47(1):111–135

    Google Scholar 

  • Grimmer J, Stewart BM (2013) Text as data: the promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts. Polit Anal 21(3):267–297

    Google Scholar 

  • Guiso L, Sapienza P, Zingales L (2006) Does culture affect economic outcomes? J Econ Persp 20(2):23–48

    Google Scholar 

  • Guiso L, Sapienza P, Zingales L (2016) Long term persistence. J Eur Econ Assoc 14(6):1401–1436

    Google Scholar 

  • Gutmann MP, Merchant EK, Roberts E (2018) ‘Big data' in economic history. J Econ Hist 75(4):268–299

    Google Scholar 

  • Hansen S, McMahon M (2016) Shocking language: understanding the macroeconomic effects of central bank communication. J Int Econ 99:S114–S133

    Google Scholar 

  • Hansen S, McMahon M, Prat A (2018) Transparency and deliberation within the FOMC: a computational linguistics approach. Quart J Econ 2(1):801–870

    Google Scholar 

  • Harkness DE (2007) The jewel house: Elizabethan London and the scientific revolution. Yale University Press, New Haven

    Google Scholar 

  • Hart JS Jr (2003) The rule of law, 1603–1660: crowns, courts and judges. Pearson Longman, Harlow

    Google Scholar 

  • Hathi Trust (n.d.) https://www.hathitrust.org. Accessed Jan–May 2016

  • Hayek FA (1960) The constitution of liberty. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Heckscher EF (1935) Mercantilism. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Helgerson R (2004) Writing the law. In: Boyer AD (ed) Law, liberty, and parliament: selected essays on the writings of Sir Edward Coke. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, pp 26–69

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill C (1965) Puritanism and revolution: studies in interpretation of the English revolution of the 17th century. Schocken Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill C (1997) Intellectual origins of the English revolution revisited. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Holdsworth WS (1935) Sir Edward Coke. Camb Law J 5(3):332–346

    Google Scholar 

  • Holdsworth WS (1938) Some makers of English law. Cambridge University Press, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Hollond HA (1947) English legal authors before 1700. Camb Law J 9(3):292–329

    Google Scholar 

  • Internet Archive (n.d.) https://archive.org. Accessed Jan–May 2016

  • Kelley DR (1993) Elizabethan political thought. In: Pocock JGA, Schochet GJ, Schwoerer L (eds) The varieties of British political thought, 1500–1800. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 47–79

    Google Scholar 

  • Kuran T (1995) Private truths, public lies. The social consequences of preference falsification. Harvard University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Lu J, Henchion M, MacNamee B (2018) Extending Jensen Shannon divergence to compare multiple corpora. In: Proceedings of the 25th Irish conference on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. https://hdl.handle.net/10197/10517

  • Lucas C, Nielsen RA, Roberts ME, Stewart BM, Storer A, Tingley D (2015) Computer-assisted text analysis for comparative politics. Polit Anal 23(2):254–277

    Google Scholar 

  • Lynam T (2016) Exploring social representations of adapting to climate change using topic modeling and Bayesian networks. Ecol Soc 21:4 (Article 16)

    Google Scholar 

  • Lyon H, Block H (1930) Edward Coke, Oracle of the law. Houghton Mifflin Co, Boston

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahlerbe M (1996) Bacon's method of science. In: Peltonen M (ed) The Cambridge companion to Bacon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 75–98

    Google Scholar 

  • Malament B (1967) The ‘economic liberalism' of Sir Edward Coke. Yale Law J 76(7):1321–1358

    Google Scholar 

  • Mathias P (1969) The first industrial nation: an economic history of Britain, 1700–1914. Methuen, London

    Google Scholar 

  • McCloskey DN (2006) The Bourgeois Virtues: ethics for an age of commerce. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • McCloskey DN (2010) Bourgeois dignity: why economics can’t explain the modern world. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • McCloskey DN (2016) Bourgeois equality: how ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Mohr JW, Bogdanov P (2013) Introduction—topic models: what they are and why they matter. Poetics 41:545–569

    Google Scholar 

  • Mokyr J (2005) The intellectual origins of modern economic growth. J Econ Hist 65(2):285–381

    Google Scholar 

  • Mokyr J (2009) The lever of riches: technological creativity and economic progress. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Mokyr J (2010) The contribution of economic history to the study of innovation and technical change: 1750–1914. In: Halland BH, Rosenberg N (eds) Handbook of the economics of innovation, vol 1. Academic Press, Burlington, pp 11–50

    Google Scholar 

  • Mokyr J (2016) A culture of growth: the origins of the modern economy. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Nenner H (1977) By colour of law: legal culture and constitutional politics in England, 1660–1689. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Newman DJ, Block S (2006) Probabilistic topic decomposition of an eighteenth-century American newspaper. J Am Soc Inform Sci Technol 57(6):653–767

    Google Scholar 

  • North DC, Weingast B (1989) Constitutions and commitment: the evolution of institutions governing public choice in seventeenth-century England. J Econ Hist 49(4):803–832

    Google Scholar 

  • North DC, Wallis JJ, Weingast BR (2009) Violence and social orders: a conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history. Cambridge University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Nunn N (2012) Culture and the historical process. Econ Hist Dev Reg 27(S1):108–126

    Google Scholar 

  • Peltonen M (1996) Introduction. In: Peltonen M (ed) The Cambridge companion to Bacon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 1–24

    Google Scholar 

  • Project Gutenberg (n.d.) https://www.gutenberg.org. Accessed Jan–May 2016

  • Reich J, Tingley D, Leder-Luis J, Roberts ME, Stewart BM (2015) Computer-assisted reading and discovery for student-generated text in massive open online courses. J Learn Anal 2(1):156–184

    Google Scholar 

  • Roberts ME, Stewart BM, Tingley D (2016) stm: R package for structural topic models. J Stat Softw 10:1–40

    Google Scholar 

  • Roberts ME, Stewart BM, Airoldi EM (2016) A model of text for experimentation in the social sciences. J Am Stat Assoc 111(515):988–1003

    Google Scholar 

  • Roberts ME, Stewart BM, Tingley D, Lucas C, Leder-Luis J, Gadarian SK, Albertson B, Rand DG (2014) Structural topic models for open-ended survey responses. Am J Polit Sci 58(4):1064–1082

    Google Scholar 

  • Rogers JG (1928) Bacon and Coke: a contrast in the law career. Rocky Mt Law Rev 1(1):30–34

    Google Scholar 

  • Sargent R-M (1996) Bacon as an advocate for cooperative scientific research. In: Peltonen M (ed) The Cambridge companion to Bacon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 146–171

    Google Scholar 

  • Sheppard S (ed) (2003) Selected writings and speeches of Sir Edward Coke. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis

    Google Scholar 

  • Siegel SA (1981) The Aristotelian basis of English law, 1450–1800. NY Univ Law Rev 56(1):18–59

    Google Scholar 

  • Tabellini G (2008) Institutions and culture. J Eur Econ Assoc 6(2–3):255–294

    Google Scholar 

  • Taddy MA (2012) On estimation and selection for topic models. In: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on artificial intelligence and statistics, pp 1184–1193

  • The Text Creation Partnership for Early English Books Online (2014) https://www.textcreationpartnership.org. Accessed Jan–May 2016

  • Tingley D (2017) Rising power on the mind. Int Organ 71(S1):S165–S188

    Google Scholar 

  • Tvinnereim E, Fløttum K (2015) Explaining topic prevalence in answers to open-ended survey questions about climate change. Nat Clim Change 5:744–748

    Google Scholar 

  • Wallach HM, Murray I, Salakhutdinov R, Mimno D (2009) Evaluation methods for topic models. In: ICML ’09 proceedings of the 26th annual international conference on machine learning, pp 1105–1112

  • Wehrheim L (2019) Economic history goes digital: topic modeling the journal of economic history. Cliometrica 13(1):83–125

    Google Scholar 

  • Wheeler H (1983) The invention of modern empiricism: juridical foundations of Francis Bacon's philosophy of science. Law Libr J 76:78–120

    Google Scholar 

  • Wootton D (2015) The invention of science: a new history of the scientific revolution, EPub edn. Harper, New York

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and discussion we thank John Baker, Michael Livermore, Masha Medvedeva, Molly Roberts, Steve Sheppard, participants at the Conference on Data Science and Law at ETH Zürich, and two anonymous reviewers.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, The Williams School of Commerce, Economics, and Politics, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, VA, 24450, USA

    Peter Grajzl

  2. CESifo, Munich, Germany

    Peter Grajzl

  3. Department of Economics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Peter Murrell

Authors
  1. Peter Grajzl
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Peter Murrell
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Grajzl.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file 1 (PDF 1699 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Grajzl, P., Murrell, P. Characterizing a legal–intellectual culture: Bacon, Coke, and seventeenth-century England. Cliometrica 15, 43–88 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-020-00202-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-020-00202-5

Keywords

JEL Classification

Search

Navigation