“THE GREATEST OF LAW BOOKS”: EXCEPTIONALLY RARE FIRST EDITION OF COKE’S COMMENTARIE, 1628, A FOUNDING INFLUENCE ON BRITISH CONSTITUTIONAL LAW AND AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES

COKE, Edward. The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England. or, a Commentarie upon Littleton, not the name of a Lawyer onely, but of the Law itself. London: Printed for the Societie of Stationers, 1628. Folio, contemporary full blind-stamped brown calf beautifully rebacked in calf-gilt, raised bands, red morocco spine label.

First edition of Coke’s First Institutes, among the greatest of British legal texts and a fundamental influence on America’s founding fathers and American revolutionary principles. With black letter type in English, Latin and French throughout, bound with scarce Table (1630) omitted from the first edition, in handsome contemporary calf.

“What Shakespeare has been to literature, what Bacon has been to philosophy, what the translators of the authorized version of the Bible have been to religion, Coke has been to the public and private law of England” (Reams, Some Makers of English Law, 132). Edward Coke devoted years “in compiling the works which have secured his immortality. If Bracton first began the codification of the Common Law, it was Coke who completed it. Ranging over the whole field of law, in comment, report, argument, and decision, the Institutes is a disorderly, pedantic, masterful work… [Here] the tradition of the common law from Bracton and Littleton, whose name Coke’s Commentarie—the first part of the Institutes—made famous, firmly established itself as the basis of the constitution of the realm” (PMM 126). “The First Institute… was the only part of the Institutes published in the author’s lifetime. It is clearly a book upon which he had been engaged in all his life… He made the supremacy of the law a cardinal doctrine of our constitutional law, and… determined the course of the development of our modern law” (Reams, 141-143, 147).

When the Mayflower landed in North America in 1620, Coke’s writings were aboard and ultimately laid the foundation for all legal training in the colonies. “Before the Revolution, Coke’s Littleton was, as Jefferson reminded Madison…‘the universal elementary textbook of law students” (Randall, Thomas Jefferson, 52-3). Jefferson noted that Coke’s Institutes “may still be considered as the fundamental code of the English law” (Sowerby II:1781). Coke’s Institutes were “also prominent and in certain ways powerfully influential” on the revolutionary fervor of colonists: “Sir Edward Coke is everywhere in the literature… the citations are almost as frequent as, and occasionally even less precise than those to Locke, Montesquieu and Voltaire” (Bailyn, 30). First edition, with 1628 on title page, folding Gradus Parentele & Consanguinitatis leaf, and page 158 bound between 159 and 160 (as in Sweet & Maxwell I:449); bound with second edition, second printing of Coke’s Table (with 1630 on title page), which “probably was intended to supplement copies” of the 1628 edition that were issued without it (STC 15789). Without scarce portraits, as often. Harvard Library Catalogue I: 411. Lowndes 489. Sweet & Maxwell I:449. STC 15784, 15789. Wing C4924. Small owner signatures on title page, light marginalia. Occasional mispagination without loss of text.

Text generally fresh, light margin dampstaining, one leaf with slight margin loss not affecting text (276). Contemporary calf boards with light rubbing as expected, beautifully rebacked.