Chapter 7 forms the second of the two chapters examining cases which one would expect to fall into the middle circle in the loose concentric circles model, where both forum internum relevance and countervailing factors may both be strong or both be weak and, as such, for the degree of protection offered to depend heavily on the way in which the ECtHR balances the factors. Chapter 7 examines cases in which applicants have objected to acting contrary to their religion or belief, or have objected to disclosing their religion or belief. Again, this chapter seeks to show that the ECtHR’s approach is consistent with its general principles concerning Article 9 as the ECtHR balances factors indicating a violation (primarily, but not only, forum internum relevance) with countervailing factors indicating no violation, to reach its decision. This chapter reiterates that the fact-sensitive nature of such cases means that protection offered ranges from a high to a low degree depending on the particular circumstances of the case.

This chapter is concerned with divine mediation and resolution of interpersonal disputes in Roman Hieradoumia. Secular disputes could be submitted to divine jurisdiction by the performance of one or other of two rituals, the setting up of a sceptre and/or the deposition of a pittakion in the sanctuary. Several different categories of low-level dispute are discussed: disagreements over the ownership of livestock; theft of other people’s money or belongings; the non-repayment of loans of money or goods; and disputes between family members, which could be extraordinarily acrimonious. Familial disputes fall into various predictable patterns, reflecting the underlying fault lines within the Hieradoumian kinship system which arise from the ambiguous status of older women within the Hieradoumian village household.

Turning to more ceremonial, less habitual actions in which a young heir’s active participation could be vital, this chapter stresses the political community’s wider investment in children as political actors. Royal children were both enablers and facilitators of diplomacy rather than merely pawns in the diplomatic and political games of adults. Children’s participation could be decisive to acts of association and diplomacy, and thus vital to readying the realm for their succession and rule. The chapter first examines attempts to secure magnate loyalty to children through oaths of fidelity and performances of homage. The earliest stages of the male life cycle had unique attributes in regard to demonstrations of loyalty, and there were substantial benefits in securing oaths to children when they were so young. The chapter then turns to focus on children’s incorporation within performances of cross-kingdom diplomacy, an important aspect of children’s education. The final section foregrounds the chanson de geste Le couronnement de Louis to examine the importance of children’s dynamic contribution at coronation and the wider political community’s investment in boy kings.

In Massachusetts, the elite solidified their identity and legitimated their claims to rule by linking veracity, and all the social perquisites that entailed, to gentlemanliness and whiteness. Laws against deceptive speech practices, and prosecutions of them, concretized and reinforced cultural associations between gentility and credibility. These prosecutions also had larger political significance. In naming defendants as false speakers, presentments and prosecutions formally defined them as ineligible for participation in a community of shared civil discourse. In perjury prosecutions, this process meant that certain men were much more likely to be believed in institutional and legal contexts, thus endowing them with greater power in those contexts. In false news prosecutions, the process enabled a small coterie to control sanctioned versions of public information. The outrage manifested over mumpers reveals elite anxieties about the strength and resilience of these still-emerging ideologies of truth-telling. But these tricksters and their interventions in polite society nevertheless managed to expose the inherent deceptiveness of the polite ethos itself.

Massachusetts was the last of the original thirteen American states to disestablish religion. Its 1780 constitution guaranteed freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retained a “mild and equitable establishment” featuring (1) ceremonial public religious language, symbols, rituals, and oaths, (2) moral instruction in state schools, and 3) state collection of tithes and required religious worship. Lead draftsman John Adams crafted this approach as a political compromise between hardline establishmentarians and radical separationists in his day. But this view also reflected his belief that too little religious freedom is a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety, while too much religious freedom is an invitation to depravity and license. After 1780, this compromise fell apart as religious pluralism and political division over religion grew in the state. Amendments of 1821 and 1833 outlawed religious test oaths, mandatory worship, and state tithe collections, but the state retained its ceremonial and moral establishments.

Massachusetts was the last of the original thirteen American states to disestablish religion. Its 1780 constitution guaranteed freedom and equality to all peaceable private religions but also retained a “mild and equitable establishment” featuring (1) ceremonial public religious language, symbols, rituals, and oaths, (2) moral instruction in state schools, and 3) state collection of tithes and required religious worship. Lead draftsman John Adams crafted this approach as a political compromise between hardline establishmentarians and radical separationists in his day. But this view also reflected his belief that too little religious freedom is a recipe for hypocrisy and impiety, while too much religious freedom is an invitation to depravity and license. After 1780, this compromise fell apart as religious pluralism and political division over religion grew in the state. Amendments of 1821 and 1833 outlawed religious test oaths, mandatory worship, and state tithe collections, but the state retained its ceremonial and moral establishments.

Nineteenth-century England had a large population of Christians who did not belong to the Church of England, and a proportion of Jews, though as yet almost no Muslims. The civic position of Jews had partly improved by this time. There was growing interest in the problems presented by what would now be thought of as ‘ecumenical relations’, with the first Lambeth Conferences giving the matter consideration, though excluding the Roman Catholics. This chapter explores the relationships between the main categories of non-Anglican Protestant Christians, including the ways in which they might be regarded as being part of the Church, that is, having an authentic ecclesial identity. The refusal of the Friends (Quakers) to take oaths was accommodated and the rights of Roman Catholics were thought through, with particular reference to Ireland. Dissenting academies were providing an excellent higher education.Problems were arising about the payment of clerical income and the costs of maintaining churches because non-Anglicans resented having to make a contribution.

The First Dynasty, an unbroken succession of Amorite kings, lasted 300 years despite a major rebellion. Babylon had close relationships with the nearby cities Sippar, Kish, and Borsippa. Trade and alliances reached much further. The Sumerian king-lists of earlier times were replaced by Babylonian equivalents, various cities having their own version. Kings briefly recorded major events; names were given to each year of their reign for dating documents. Trade was widespread, by canal and river, or overland by donkey. Royal edicts excluded certain groups from trade. Evidence comes from a profusion of clay tablets. Official letters are plentiful. Priestesses of Marduk carried out trade for Babylon in other cities. The temple of Marduk was built and furnished with a golden throne. Elamite control over several major cities, which left its mark on temple design, was ended by Hammurabi late in his reign; there is a possible connection with Genesis 14:1–16. Regular edicts were issued to release individuals from debt and to regulate trade. The main powers were Halab (Aleppo), Eshnunna, and Larsa, until Hammurabi achieved supremacy and claimed divinity. His successor Samsu-iluna followed his father’s example.

Oaths were ubiquitous in late medieval society, binding men to political structures and leaders. With the Reformation in Scotland, oaths became an important tool of indoctrination and engagement, used by early reformers and later dissidents to bind the consciences of male and female followers and by the crown to weed dangerous opinions out of government and wider society. From 1581, reformers linked assertory confessional oaths, traditional Scottish bands promising mutual aid and the Old Testament trope of the covenanted nation to create powerful collective oaths taken by men and women in parishes across Scotland. The swearing of the King’s Confession, the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant allowed the nation’s commitments to be invoked to justify political demands, even when actual opinions were divided. This chapter examines the development of collective oaths from the reign of James VI, tracing an unfolding battle to control the opinions of subjects at large, including, under James VII, a brief experiment in the lifting of all oaths except civil allegiance.

Chapter 6 examines the particular question of John Locke’s position on the toleration of Catholics. This, the chapter argues, was the major area in which his views did not significantly evolve. Recent scholars have tried to establish that Locke softened his position on the intolerability of Catholics by appealing to a ‘loyalist’, oath-taking minority tradition within the Catholic chapter. This chapter refutes this claim and demonstrates Locke’s lifelong refusal to countenance such Gallican (or, in the English context, ‘Blackloist’) solutions to the Catholic question. When these views of Locke are set in their full context, they emerge as another variation on his rejection of the ‘Hobbesian politique’. Loyalist Catholics after the civil war were strongly influenced by the sovereignty theory of Hobbes and on that basis appealed for toleration as an act of monarchical prerogative. Locke’s hardening opposition to such forms of indulgence alienated him from such strategies. Catholics, he came to believe, were irretrievably dominated by either the papacy or the state and thus could not appeal for religious freedom as an inalienable right.

This chapter investigates the two non-establishment clauses in the U.S. Constitution: the no-religious-test clause in Article VI, and the no-establishment-of-religion clause in the First Amendment. Since religious tests were the clearest manifestation of state sovereignty over religion, their prohibition in Article VI elided any notion of a “Church of the United States” even before the First Amendment. The federal oath-Congress’s first act-no longer required a denial of Catholic beliefs as previous oaths had, yet loyalty remained a prerequisite to securing religious liberty. The chapter then contends that the First Amendment establishment clause was based on what Congress had stated in 1783: that powers in “purely spiritual” matters were “reserved to the several States, individually.” Congress had declared this principle in response to the Holy See’s request for it to approve a Catholic bishop, and had thus renounced one of the rights of patronage that governments traditionally held over ecclesiastical affairs. This context adds to the original meaning of the establishment clause, for simply prohibiting a national church did not necessarily forbid this right of patronage.

Notions of a person’s ‘worth’ were socially created, This chapter looks for the notions of worth involved in the multifarious everyday transactions between people. As so much depended on others, peasant farmers could not afford to trust anyone who was not of good reputation. Fair dealing and the common good were important in the moral economy of working life not because transactions between neighbours were altruistic, nor even necessarily friendly, but because they were essential. Tenth century laws regulating the hundred built on a moral economy which valued good reputation and personal knowledge and in which co-operation mattered. Courts came to collective decisions, sworn oaths established truth and standing surety for another person meant that personal knowledge of the accused was essential. The witness of neighbours was vital when it came to questions of land: boundary clauses from the ninth and tenth century were based on detailed knowledge which only local people could provide. Peasant farmers became more formally part of the financial system when heregeld began to be levied.

This chapter questions whether FitzNigel’s account of negotiated agreements is a credible description of the situation of peasants vis-à-vis their lords. It does so by looking at estate policies. Pre-Conquest surveys show categories of people whose livelihood depended on their working on a landowner’s inland and whose forebears and descendants were similarly dependent. Twelfth-century surveys show landowners beginning to require a record of what they could expect from named individuals among the rest of the peasantry. These documents were frequently headed by the names of jurors who had sworn to their veracity so obligations were now legalised. The detail in which they were recorded show that ‘custom’ was not what had been the case ‘from time immemorial’, but what had been negotiated and agreed to be owed from what was now a ‘tenement’.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Since the first settlements in British North America, Christianity and the Bible have had a significant influence on American jurisprudence. This reflects Christianity’s expansive influence on Western legal traditions in general and the English common law in particular. Christianity’s influence on American law was most pronounced in the colonial era, especially in New England’s Puritan commonwealths. Early colonial laws drew extensively from biblical sources, especially Mosaic law as interpreted within the colonists’ theological traditions. Christianity also contributed to an evolving constitutional tradition in the colonies and, later, the newly independent states, culminating in the U.S. Constitution framed in 1787. This is evident in broad principles, such as the separation of powers needed to check the abuse of government powers vested in fallen human actors, as well as in specific provisions such as the Article III, § 3 requirement that convictions for treason be supported by “the testimony of two witnesses” and the Fifth Amendment prohibition on double jeopardy. Although Christianity remained a dominant cultural force well into the nineteenth century and beyond, church-state separationists, secularists, and rationalists increasingly challenged its influence on law. This is seen, for example, in bitter political and legal controversies involving the Sunday mails, blasphemy laws, and the Bible’s invocation as authority in judicial proceedings. These disputes signaled Christianity’s declining influence in an increasingly secular age.