In 17th-century England, the law was not an instrument of justice - it was an instrument of oppression.

So argues Christopher Hill in this classic study.

The enclosures, loss of many traditional rights and draconian punishments for minor transgressions changed the lives of the peasantry and created a landless class of wage labourers.

Hill explores the immense social changes that occurred and the expressions of liberty against the law through, for example, the literary culture of the times and the hero-worship of the outlaw.

As well as short chapters on gypsies and vagabonds, Hill has much to say about class, religion and the shift away from the importance of the church after the Reformation.

‘Barely twenty per cent of the population, Hill estimates, could have been content with the law, and he celebrates the energetic dissenters, like poachers, highwaymen, smugglers, pirates — and the antinomians, who claimed sexual liberty on the creative grounds that the godly were exempt from moral law...’ – Keith Thomas in the Guardian

‘He deconstructs what was until recently the received version of English history, and leaves it tattered ... In celebrations of the vagabond life, in Robin Hood ballads and the romances of piracy, in meditations on the noble savage, and especially in the poems of John Clare, Hill finds a culture of dissent from the grim canon of progress’ – Derek Hirst in The Times Literary Supplement

Christopher Hill (1912-2003) was a university lecturer in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history, and from 1965 to 1978 he was Master of Balliol College. His many books and textbooks include ‘The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution’ and ‘Liberty Against the Law’.

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