William Petyt

The title page of the first edition of Petyt's Jus parliamentarium (1739)[1]

William Petyt (or Petit) (1641?–1707) was an English barrister and writer, and a political propagandist in the Whig interest.

Life

Petyt was born at Storiths, Bolton Abbey,[2] and educated at Ermysted's Grammar School, Skipton and Christ's College, Cambridge.[3][4] He was admitted to the Middle Temple but was later associated with the Inner Temple.[5]

Petyt was Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London,[6] replacing in that position Robert Brady who had made a very effective attack for the Tories on Petyt's The Antient Right of the Commons of England Asserted (1680).[7] Petyt was attacked also from his own side, the Whigs, by Thomas Hunt.[8]

Petyt wrote against the separation of powers, and in favour of Parliament's control of the judiciary.[9] Influential in its time, in particular on John Locke, was a version of "ancient constitutionalism" propounded in the writings of John Sadler, James Tyrrell and Petyt.[10]

Legacy

Modern verdicts on Petyt as a historian have been harsh. David C. Douglas[11] comments that he and William Atwood, though distinguished jurists, "took what was worst" from the earlier works of their century on constitutional history. J. H. Plumb wrote that it was hard not convict Petyt, "not only of error, but also of deceit".[12]

Works

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 William Petyt (1739), Jus parliamentarium: or, the ancient power, jurisdiction, rights and liberties, of the most high court of Parliament, revived and asserted. In two parts. By William Petyt, Esq; Late of the Inner-Temple, and Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London, London: Printed for and sold by John Nourse, at the Lamb without Temple Bar; M. Green, at Charing Cross; Cæsar Ward, and Richard Chandler, at the Ship without Temple Bar, and at their shops in Coney Street, York, and at Scarborough Spaw; George Hawkins, at Milton’s Head between the Temple Gates in Fleet Street, and at Tunbridge Wells; and Thomas Waller, in the Middle Temple Cloysters [London], OCLC 613603611.
  2. ↑ http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~petyt/wsbiog.htm
  3. ↑ http://www.ermysteds.n-yorks.sch.uk/general/history.htm
  4. ↑ "Petit, William (PTT660W)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  5. ↑ Andrew Pyle (editor), The Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers (2000), Thoemmes Press (two volumes), article Petyt, William, p. 656-7.
  6. ↑ http://www.innertemplelibrary.org.uk/library-history/library-history-18th-century.htm
  7. ↑ Alan Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century (1993), p. 29.
  8. ↑ Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Seventeenth Century British Philosophers (2000), article pp. 457–458.
  9. ↑ Jeffrey Denys Goldsworthy, The Sovereignty of Parliament: History and Philosophy (1999), p. 153.
  10. ↑ John Marshall, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (1994), p. 278.
  11. ↑ David C. Douglas, The English Scholars (1939), p. 163.
  12. ↑ J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (1967), p. 29.

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