Matthew Hale

English lawyer, scholar, and judge

• Born: November 1, 1609
• Birthplace: Alderley, Gloucestershire, England
• Died: December 25, 1676
• Place of death: Alderley, Gloucestershire, England

Hale, a lawyer, scholar, and author, who climaxed a brilliant legal career by serving as lord chief justice of the Court of the King’s Bench, was one of the three or four most important contributors to the seventeenth century evolution of English common law.

Early Life

Matthew Hale was born on November 1, 1609, at Alderley Grange, his parents’ country home in Gloucestershire. The Hale family had moved up into the ranks of the landed gentry half a century earlier after making a fortune in the cloth industry. His mother, née Jane Poyntz, came from an old Gloucestershire family that claimed descent from one of William the Conqueror’s Norman knights. His father, Robert Hale, had been called to the bar at London’s Lincoln’s Inn but soon after gave up his legal practice for the life of a country squire. Matthew, their only child, was left an orphan by 1614. His Puritan guardian and kinsman, Anthony Kingscot, had him educated first by the equally Puritan local vicar and then, in 1626, sent him to Magdalen College, Oxford, to be trained for a career in the church. Hale’s tutor at Oxford was Obadiah Sedgwick, a noted Puritan preacher and enemy of episcopacy.

Unusually tall, well built, and physically strong, the young Hale read Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and the other major medieval philosophers, but he also found plenty of time for keeping up with the latest fashions in dress, going to the theater, and engaging in sports such as fencing, at which he excelled. Feeling no call to an ecclesiastical career, Hale thought of becoming a professional soldier in the Dutch service. Then, a business visit to London in the spring or summer of 1628 altered the course of his life. Visiting Lincoln’s Inn, Hale got into conversation with some of his father’s old friends, who aroused in him a fascination with the field of law. The result was that he enrolled as a student there on November 8, 1628.

Hale’s proclivities for sports, fine clothes, and entertainment were gradually abandoned as he began to master the mysteries of his new calling. Studying at least eight and sometimes sixteen hours each day, he read deeply not only in English law but also in Roman law and history. His new studious habits and sober lifestyle in time attracted the favorable attention of one of the governing benchers of the Inn, William Noy. The older man took Hale into his chambers, showing him such favor that friends and colleagues began referring to him as “Young Noy.”

Life’s Work

The patronage of Noy, who became King Charles I’s attorney general in 1631 (though he died three years later) must have been very valuable to Hale in launching his career. Called to the bar on May 17, 1636, Hale rapidly won a reputation as a skillful conveyancer and was employed by many clients attached to the royal court. During the early 1640’s, as the political confrontation between the king and Parliament developed into the English Civil War, he was called upon to counsel a number of eminent Royalists who were being indicted or impeached. Evidence suggests that he advised the first earl of Strafford with regard to his impeachment in 1641, and he actually represented Archbishop William Laud at the archbishop’s impeachment trial in 1643. There is reason to believe that it was Hale who advised King Charles I not to recognize the jurisdiction of the special court that, without his cooperation, convicted him and sentenced him to death in January, 1649.

His Royalist connections did not hinder Hale’s professional advancement—a very unusual situation in the anti-Royalist London of the 1640’s and 1650’s that, more than any other evidence, indicates just how skilled and esteemed a lawyer Hale must have been. In 1648, he was elected a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn. During the period of the Commonwealth (1649-1660), he continued to represent accused Royalists such as the duke of Hamilton, commander of the Scottish Royalist army that had invaded England in August, 1648, and the Reverend Christopher Love, a Presbyterian minister accused of plotting to restore the monarchy. In 1650, at a hearing in London’s Guildhall, he argued for the conservative point of view that the lord mayor and sheriffs ought to be elected by only the liverymen of the guilds rather than by all the freemen of the city.

Despite these Royalist and conservative activities, in January, 1652, Hale was named by the members of the Rump Parliament to a special commission charged with making recommendations for legal reform. He even served as chairman of the commission, sometimes referred to as the Hale Commission, for the first few weeks of its work, though he was afterward an infrequent attender of its meetings. Although Hale supported removing jurisdiction over the probating of wills from the church courts and giving it instead to the common law courts, he disapproved, like most professional lawyers, of most of the commission’s recommendations as either too radical or too impractical.

Under the Protectorate (1653-1659), Hale fared even better, being appointed a sergeant-at-law on January 25, 1653, and five days later a justice of the Court of Common Pleas, England’s highest civil court. The promotion meant leaving Lincoln’s Inn and moving into new quarters in the Sergeant’s Inn in Chancery Lane, where he stayed for the remainder of his career. Although he refused to preside at the trial of Penruddock and other Royalists at Exeter in April, 1655, seven months later Hale was appointed a member of the Committee on Trade, which advised Oliver Cromwell on mercantile matters. After Cromwell’s death in September, 1658, apart from serving briefly for Oxford University in Richard Cromwell’s only Parliament, Hale retired temporarily from public life and began to devote his time to study and writing.

Elected to the Convention Parliament in April, 1660, Hale actively supported the Restoration of the monarchy a month later and, on June 22, was reappointed a sergeant. In that capacity, he assisted in the prosecution of the surviving regicides who had been responsible for Charles I’s execution. On November 7, 1660, Charles II appointed him to preside over the Court of Exchequer (the highest revenue court) in Westminster Hall as lord chief baron and at the same time made him a knight. After the Great Fire, which destroyed much of the old city of London in the first week of September, 1666, it was apparently Hale who drafted the act passed by Parliament the following February establishing a Court of Fire Judges, and, during the next few years, he was one of the most active members of the court, hearing some 140 of the cases that were brought before it. On May 18, 1671, he was appointed chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench, the country’s highest criminal court.

Hale’s Puritan background was reflected in his general lifestyle in his mature years. He believed in wearing clothes of plain brown or black English cloth, and he continued for the rest of his life to dress in the manner that had been in fashion when he was thirty. A strict Sabbatarian, he was also abstemious in eating and drinking. He was not interested in either music or art, and he never traveled abroad. Apparently he knew no foreign language beyond the smattering of French that all lawyers had. Although he was very interested in scientific research, he once told a Suffolk jury from the bench that “that there were such creatures as witches, he made no doubt at all; for… the scriptures had affirmed so much.” The general moral climate of Restoration England he found deplorable: “It is rare to find a temperate or sober master, or a sober and faithful servant, a sober and discreet husband, or a prudent or modest wife,” he remarked close to the end of his life.

By his first wife, Anne Moore, Hale had ten children, of whom four sons and two daughters lived to adulthood. His second marriage, in 1667, to Anne Bishop, a woman of humble origin said to have previously been his housekeeper, caused a small scandal. Nevertheless, all of his contemporaries agreed that he was a good and faithful husband and a kindly and dutiful father and grandfather. He was also a good landlord to his tenants and an almost fanatical believer in kindness to animals.

By the autumn of 1675, Lord Chief Justice Hale was in very poor health. He would not resign, because he believed that justices should serve at the king’s pleasure. In February of the following year, however, the king reluctantly agreed to accept his retirement. Hale spent the remaining months of his life reading and writing at his country home, Alderley. He died there on Christmas Day, 1676, and was buried in the parish churchyard ten days later.

Significance

In spite of the strong Puritan influences on his youth and a lifelong distaste for pomp and ceremony in worship, Hale always supported the principle that the Church of England should be governed by its bishops. After the Restoration in 1660, however, he was among those who wanted to compromise with the Presbyterians by having the bishops administer their dioceses with the aid of elected synods. He also tried, as a judge, to protect Protestant Noncomformists from the harshest aspects of the new set of penal laws called the Clarendon Code by taking the position that dissent that was not seditious or in any way criminal. One of his close neighbors at Acton, the London suburb where he purchased a residence in 1667, was the noted Dissenting preacher and writer Richard Baxter, with whom he spent many hours discussing books and philosophers.

As a judge, Hale contributed to the development of modern ethical standards for the English judiciary, both by his own personal example of fairness and firmness and by his insistence that he, and everyone who worked under his supervision, be completely above suspicion of favoritism or corruption. He was reckoned more learned in the law than any other judge of his day; more important, however, he was also well-read in both science and philosophy. As a result, he approached the study of law in an orderly and systematic manner. He tried to learn and understand how the common law had evolved from its primitive origins into the complex system of his own day and how it could best be adapted and improved.

One of the fruits of his researches was a large collection of books and manuscripts, most of which went to the Lincoln’s Inn library at his death. Though only two short essays by him on scientific topics were published in his lifetime, in the century after his death some two dozen additional titles culled from his manuscript notes were published, on scientific and sociological as well as legal topics. Various essays have been issued in more than two hundred editions down to the present day. Most important is his History of the Pleas of the Crown (1736) and History of the Common Law (1713), which deal with criminal and civil law respectively. Described by a modern commentator as “the first book with any pretense to be a comprehensive account of the growth of English law,” the latter work is still in print today.

Bibliography

Campbell, Lord. The Lives of the Chief Justices of England. Vol. 2. New York: Cockcroft, 1878. Reprint. Holmes Beach, Fla.: Gaunt, 1997. Includes a short biography of Hale.

Cotterell, Mary. “Interregnum Law Reform: The Hale Commission of 1652.” English Historical Review 83 (October, 1986): 689-704. This article, based almost entirely on primary source materials, covers the work of the commission in greater detail than does Heward or other Hale biographers.

Cromartie, Alan. Sir Matthew Hale, 1609-1676: Law, Religion, and Natural Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Examines Hale’s theories about law, politics, religion, and natural science.

Hale, Sir Matthew. The History of the Common Law of England. Edited by Charles M. Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. The editor, in an introductory essay, discusses in detail Hale’s place among seventeenth century legal writers and his contributions to the development of modern common law concepts. Explains why this particular work is considered to be the first great classic in the literature of English legal history.

Heward, Edmund. Matthew Hale. London: Robert Hale, 1972. Written by a lawyer, for lawyers, but interesting to other readers as well. Includes a complete list of, and commentary on, all of Hale’s published works. Like most Hale biographies, it is primarily based on Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, and Richard Baxter’s Additional Notes on the Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale, both published in London in 1682.

Holdsworth, Sir William Searle. A History of English Law. 9 vols. London: Methuen, 1903-1932. Reprint. London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1966. A brief account of Hale’s life, together with a survey of his legal writings and his contributions to legal thought. The best short modern treatment. Thoroughly footnoted.

Hostettler, John. The Red Gown: The Life and Works of Sir Matthew Hale. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Barry Rose Law, 2002. Biography of Hale written by a British legal historian and former magistrate.

Shapiro, Barbara J. “Law and Science in Seventeenth Century England.” Stanford Law Review 21 (April, 1969): 727-766. Discusses how Hale’s research into scientific and legal problems were interrelated, and how he reflected and affected the intellectual climate of his age.