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