John Selden was an English jurist and a scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and scholar of Jewish law. He was known as a polymath showing true intellectual depth and breadth.
Background
Selden was born on December 16, 1584 in Salvington, England. He was baptised at St Andrew's, the parish church. The cottage in which he was born survived until 1959 when it was destroyed by a fire caused by an electrical fault. His father, another John Selden, had a small farm. It is said that his skill as a violin-player was what attracted his wife, Margaret, who was from a better family, being the only child of Thomas Baker of Rustington and descended from a knightly family of Kent.
Education
Selden was educated at the free grammar school at Chichester, The Prebendal School, and in 1600 he went on to Hart Hall, Oxford. In 1603 he was admitted to Clifford's Inn, London; in 1604 he moved to the Inner Temple; and in 1612 he was called to the bar.
Career
In 1603 Selden was admitted a member of Clifford's Inn, London, and in 1604 migrated to the Inner Temple, and in 1612 he was called to the bar.
His earliest patron was Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary, by whom he seems to have been employed in copying and abridging certain of the parliamentary records then preserved in the Tower.
In 1613 Selden supplied a series of notes, enriched by an immense number of quotations and references, to the first eighteen cantos of Drayton's Polyolbion.
In 1614 he published Titles of Honour, which, in spite of some obvious defects and omissions, has remained to the present day the most comprehensive and trustworthy work of its kind that we possess; and in 1616 his notes on Fortescue's De laudibus legum Angliae and Ralph de Hengham's Summae magna et parva.
In 1617 his De diis Syriis was issued, and immediately established his fame as an oriental scholar among the learned in all parts of Europe. It is remarkable for its brilliant use of the comparative method; in which it was far ahead of its age, and is still consulted by students of Semitic mythology.
Selden was with several of the members committed to prison, at first in the Tower and subsequently under the charge of Sir Robert Ducie, sheriff of London.
In 1623 he was returned to the House of Commons for the borough of Lancaster, and sat with Coke, Noy and Pym on Sergeant Glanville's election committee.
For this the benchers of the Inner Temple, by whom he had been appointed, fined him £20 and disqualified him from being chosen one of their number.
In the first parliament of Charles I (1625), it appears from the "returns of members", printed in 1878, that, contrary to the assertion of all his biographers, Selden had no seat.
In Charles's second parliament (1626) he was elected for Great Bedwin in Wiltshire, and took a prominent part in the impeachment of George VilUers, duke of Buckingham.
In the following year, in the "benevolence" case, he was counsel for Sir Edmund Hampden in the court of king's bench.
In 1628 he was returned to the third parliament of Charles for Ludgershall, and had a large and important share in drawing up and carrying the Petition of Right.
In the session of 1629 Selden was one of the members mainly responsible for the tumultuous passage in the House of Commons of the resolution against the legal levy of tonnage and poundage, and, along with Eliot, Holies, Long, Valentine, Strode, and the rest, he was sent once more to the Tower.
In 1628 at the suggestion of Sir Robert Cotton, Selden compiled, with the assistance of two learned coadjutors, Patrick Young and Richard James, a catalogue of the Arundel marbles.
He employed his leisure at Wrest in writing De successionibus in bona defuncti secundum leges Ebraeorum and De successions in pontificalum Ebraeorum, published in 1631.
It had been written sixteen or seventeen years before; but James I had prohibited its publication for political reasons; hence it appeared a quarter of a century after Grotius's Mare liberum, to which it was intended to be a rejoinder, and the pretensions advanced in which on behalf of the Dutch fishermen to poach in the waters off the British coasts it was its purpose to explode.
Selden opposed the resolution against episcopacy which led to the exclusion of the bishops from the House of Lords, and printed an answer to the arguments used by Sir Harbottle Grimston on that occasion.
He was equally opposed to the court on the question of the commissions of lieutenancy of array and to the parliament on the question of the militia ordinance.
In 1643 he participated in the discussions of the assembly of divines at Westminster, and was appointed shortly afterwards keeper of the rolls and records in the Tower.
In 1645 Selden was named one of the parliamentary commissioners of the admiralty, and was elected master of Trinity Hall in Cambridge-an office, a position he declined to accept.
In 1646 he subscribed the Solemn League and Covenant, and in 1647 was voted £5000 by the parliament as compensation for his sufferings in the evil days of the monarchy.
In 1880 a brass tablet was erected to his memory by the benchers of the Inner Temple in the parish church of West Tarring.
Several of Selden's minor productions were printed for the first time after his death, and a collective edition of his writings was published by Archdeacon Wilkins in 3 vols. in 1725, and again in 1726.
Selden's Table Talk, by which he is perhaps best known, did not appear until 1689. It was edited by his amanuensis, Richard Milward, who affirms that "the sense and notion is wholly Selden's, " and that "most of the words" are his also. Its genuineness has sometimes been questioned, although on insufficient grounds.
Religion
Selden joined in the protestation of the Commons for the maintenance of the Protestant religion according to the doctrines of the Church of England, the authority of the crown, and the liberty of the subject.