The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History
Mark Nicholls author Allen Boyer author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:1st Feb '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book explores the development and application of the law of treason in England across more than a thousand years, placing this legal history within a broader historical context.
Describing many high-profile prosecutions and trials, the book focuses on the statutes, ordinances and customs that have at various times governed, limited and shaped this worst of crimes. It explores the reasons why treason coalesced around specific offences agreed by both the monarch and the wider political nation, why it became an essential instrument of enforcement in high politics, and why, over the past three hundred years, it has gradually fallen into disuse while remaining on the statute book. This book also considers why treason as both a word and a concept remains so potent in wider modern culture, investigating prevalent current misconceptions about what is and what is not treason. It concludes by suggesting that the abolition or 'death' of treason in the near future, while a logical next step, is by no means a foregone conclusion.
The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History is a thorough academic introduction for scholars and history students, as well as general readers with an interest in British political and legal history.
“According to the Great Statute of Treasons, 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the Chancellor, Treasurer, or Judges in Execution of their Duty’. Allen Boyer (an American attorney and historian) and Mark Nicholls (a Cambridge academic) have what at first appears a straightforward project: to trace the path followed by English law for more than a millennium in categorising, criminalising and penalising treasonable acts. They conclude that treason as a crime has had its day: ‘Today, dangers inherent in the prosecution of treason manifestly outweigh the advantages, and the absurdity of a 21st-century state deriving weighty and drastic legal conclusions from a 14th-century statute has become ever more obvious’ . . . .
[Yet] Boyer and Nicholls’s parting reflection merits attention: while high treason may no longer be a sensible juridical tool . . . the last thirty years have brought ‘a chill wind’. ‘Authoritarianism and intolerance,’ they suggest, ‘are on the rise, assuming many guises. Intolerance and fear breed societies in which paranoia flourishes, informers settle to their work, in which the need for an unchallenged authority seems compelling. Under these conditions the old pulse starts to beat again. Treason twitches and bestirs itself.’”
Sir Stephen Sedley, "Boil the Cook," London Review of Books, 18 July 2024 (Vol. 46/14).
"The book offers ‘a framing narrative which takes the story of English treason from its Anglo-Saxon roots right up until yesterday... This long story [of treason] needs to be told, because treason is too often seen in the snapshot of a particular moment... We try 'to give a picture of English treason almost before the word "treason" existed', move on 'through the Norman Conquest, into the medieval period, where the word itself began to appear and it became an articulated crime', and then range far beyond."
James Sewry,"In Conversation with Mark Nicholls," The Historian, Summer 2024 (Issue 162)
ISBN: 9780367509934
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 789g
334 pages