L.
L. Blake.
The Royal Law: Source of our Freedom Today.
London:
Shepheard-Walwyn,
2000.
viii,119pp.
Hardback, ISBN
0856831913.
Publisher's
recommended price £12.95
We
little realise
how important for our civil liberties the words of the coronation
service
are. The service is not just a meaningless pageant, but the occasion
when
Divine Law is acknowledged as the source of all our law. The same point
is made in the famous statement of the thirteenth century lawyer
Bracton,
that the king or queen 'must not be under man but under God and the
law,
for the law makes the king'. The barons, in forcing King John to sign
Magna
Carta, were insisting that he observe this principle and his coronation
oath.
This
book shows
that there is government behind government, with a greater purpose and
permanence than the changing spectrum of party political strife. This
government
consists of institutions, mostly of medieval origin, the monarchy,
parliament,
common law, jury system, church, universities and armed forces. The
powers
working through these institutions (which meet in the House of Lords)
are
made available to the government of the day, and may be retracted if
and
when they are abused - as the prime minister of Australia discovered in
1975.
Two
appendices
are included, one containing large parts of the coronation service of
Queen
Elizabeth II, the other an Anglo-Saxon document entitled Institutes
of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical.
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