‘Common weal’ (i.e. common well-being) was the synonym found in
the parliamentary petitions which moved into English in the first half of
the fifteenth century for what had earlier been called variously bien
commun, le bien du Roialme et ease de le poeple, commune profit, chose
publique, and in the chancellor’s Latin could still be termed in a parlia-
ment of Henry VII Respublicaor Regno publicum et commune bonum.
In 1447 a group of London parsons petitioned the Commons in parlia-
ment about a lack of schoolmasters in the city, which was ‘the common
concourse of this land’, for where teachers were few ‘the masters wax
rich in money, and learners poor in cunning, as experience openly
shewith, against all virtue and order of well publik’. One of the accusa-
tions that brought down Henry VI’s leading minister, the duke of
Suffolk, in 1450 was that he had betrayed to the self-styled king of
France ‘the privitees of your Council, as well of this your Realm for the
common weal of the same’ as of the governance of Henry’s realm
of France. David Starkey has pointed to the use of the rhetoric of
‘commonwealth’ (an alternative form of ‘common weal’) in the crisis of
Henry VI’s kingship and the duke of York’s attempt to put royal
governance to rights.^8
Only the language of commonwealth was new, however: this was no
more the first ‘age of reform’ than was Elton’s ‘Tudor revolution in
government’, but stands in the line of attempted reforms of ‘the state of
the king and the kingdom’ stretching back to the baronial movement of
the mid-thirteenth century and Thomas of Lancaster’s criticism of the
state of Edward II’s household. Indeed, ‘state’ in its concatenation of
meanings comes into the English language at the same time as
‘commonweal’. Gower refers to ‘the kinges hihe astat’, that which ‘to a
kinges stat belongeth’ and the ‘good astat’ of his reign, and believes that
the stars control, in peace and in war, ‘the stat of realmes and of kinges’
(the latter phrase reversing the traditional order of priority). The final
lines of Confessio Amantisexhort every ‘staat in his degree’ to work for
peace and the chivalry (the knights) to defend ‘the comun right’, and call
on the ‘astatz’ of the towns to be amended; none of which is possible
without the efforts of the ‘stat... | Above alle othre on erthe hiere’ (i.e.
the king), who must first learn to ‘kepe and reule his owne astat’ and
live in dread of the king of heaven.^9 In 1450 Suffolk denied all the
accusations made against him ‘touching the King’s high person, and
the estate of his realm’; and the Commons, alarmed at ‘the state’ of
Henry VI in terms of the grievous indebtedness which had been
298 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^8) RPiii. 577a, iv. 129, 154, 159, 249, v. 121, 137, 178, vi. 267; D. Starkey, ‘Which age of
reform?’: ch. 1 of Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and
Administration, ed. C. Coleman and D. Starkey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
(^9) Confessio Amantis, book v, line 3335, vii, lines 646, 3010, 3136, 4245 etc., viii, lines
2971–3172.