Although he wrote relatively little by Elizabethan standards and his life remains obscure, William Fulbecke was an important legal writer and historian of the late sixteenth century whose significance derives principally from his influential comparative approach to the study of law in an era during which common-law study remained largely impervious to other legal systems. He was also one of the earliest authors of works in English on the canon and civil laws, previously composed in Latin or French. As literature, his work is of interest for its application of a dramatic, frequently euphuistic prose style both to the narration of ancient history and to the discussion of relatively dry matters of jurisprudence, a style that would soon pass out of fashion with the advent in the early seventeenth century of a taste for the more clipped and terse prose epitomized by Tacitus and represented among legal authors...