The Gazette 1967/71

SIR JOHN DAVIES, 1569-1626 By DR. GEOFFREY HAND, Dean of the Faculty of Law, University College, Dublin

of the young barrister-poet must have seemed almost at an end. 'If aught can teach us aught, Affliction's looks, Making us look into ourselves so near, Teach us to know ourselves beyond all books, Or all the learned Schools that ever were. This mistress lately pluckt me by the ear, And many a golden lesson hath me taught; Hath made my Senses quick, and Reason clear, Reform'd my Will and rectified my Thought'. So he wrote in his next, and by some deemed greatest, poem, Nosce Teipsum. Plainly, if the Archbishop of Canterbury thought his poetry deserved burning for obscenity, the writing of a lengthy didactic poem on the immortality of the soul might help in rehabilitation; and so it did. Nosce Teipsum has various legal references. The Soul, deciding upon the evidence brought before it by the Senses, is likened to the Lord Chancellor: 'But when the cause itself must be decreed Himself in person, in his proper Court, To grave and solemn hearing doth proceed, Of every proof and every by-report. Then like God's angel he pronounceth right. And milk and honey from his tongue doth flow; Happy are they that still are in his sight, To reap the wisdom which his lips do sow'. (Not everyone observed the resemblance of Lord Ellesmere to an angel). Ingeniously, original sin was compared to the forfeiture of its charter by a corporation. In 1601 Davies was allowed back to the Bar and became a Member of Parliament; and here, as he began a new career, we can take leave of him as a poet. 1603 was a decisive year in the career of Sir John Davies. James VI of Scots became James I of England; Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, the last effective leader of the old Gaelic order, made his submission; and James sent Davies (just knighted) to Ireland as Solicitor-General. He became Attorney-General three years later 174

In 1947 a volume in the Everyman's Library series, called Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century, devoted a hundred pages to the poetry of Sir John Davies. In 1967 the Queen's Bench, the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords had successively to consider, in Rondel v. Worsley, one of Sir John's enduring contributions to common law legal traditions — the idea of the barrister's fee as, strictly, an honorarium, and the correlative immunity of the profession in professional negli gence. In 1969 Professor John Barry, Professor of Medieval History at University College, Cork, published a new edition of Sir John's Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued. And, down the years, many practitioners who have no especial fondness for sixteenth- century poetry or medieval history have used the Civil Bill procedure which descends to us from the time of Davies and in the invention of which he must have had at least a considerable part. Sir John, who was, in Professor Barry's words, 'a versatile, gifted, renaissance Englishman', would surely regret that our compartmentalised ideas of human knowledge make it difficult to appreciate him fully to-day. The fourth centenary of his birth seems to have slipped by unnoticed, except in Professor Barry's well-timed publication. Though his name at least suggests Welsh ancestry, Davies was born in Wiltshire. Educated at Win- -chester and at Queen's College, Oxford, he was called to the Bar in 1595. About this time he wrote one of his two most important poems, The Orchestra: or, a Poem on Dancing. The Orchestra was dedicated to a legal friend, Richard Martin: To whom shall I this dancing poem send, This sudden, rash, half-capriole of my wit?' But in 1597 Martin and Davies fell out and Davies struck Martin in the dining-hall of their Inn. He was in consequence expelled and, as a little later the Archbishop of Canterbury ordered a trans lation of Ovid containing some notably coarse contributions from Davies to be burnt, the career