Selden, JOHN, an illustrious English scholar and jurist, was born at Salvington near Worthing in Sussex, 16th December 1584, studied at Hart Hall, Oxford, for three years, and then removed, first to Clifford's Inn, London, and afterwards to the Inner Temple, to study law. It was here that his great learning began to attract attention, and won for him the friendship of Camden, Usher, Sir Robert Cotton, and Sir Henry Spelman. As a conveyancer and chamber-counsel he acquired wealth, yet found time for studies at once profound and wide in range. Selden wrote his first treatise, relating to the civil government of Britain previous to the Norman Conquest, and entitled Aualectou Anglo-Britannicon (1606), when only twenty-two years of age. In 1610 appeared his Jani Anglorum Facies Altera (Eng. trans. 1683), giving an account of the common and statute law of English Brittany to the death of Henry II., and also The Duello, or Single Combat, a history of trial by battle; and in 1614 was published his Titles of Honour, still an authority. Three years later appeared his erudite work on the Syrian gods, especially in their connection with the Old Testament, entitled De Dīs Syriis Syntagmata Duo. His History of Tithes (1618) demolished their divine right, and brought down upon his head the fulminations of the clergy, much more noisy than convincing. Fortunately for his assailants the Privy-council suppressed the book and forbade him to reply. In 1621 Selden suffered a brief imprisonment for advising the parliament to repudiate King James's doctrine that their privileges were originally royal grants; in 1623 he was elected member for Lancaster, in 1626 for Great Bedwin, and in 1628 for Ludgershall, both in Wilts, and henceforward till his death he took a considerable part in public affairs.
He was sincerely attached to the cause of the parliament, and as sincerely opposed to the views of the court party and the king, but he was above all things a constitutional lawyer, and derived his ideas of the rights of the subject from the history of the nation, and not from religious fanaticism or metaphysical considerations. Still he 'loved his ease,' as Clarendon says, and so let things be done without protest of which he did not approve. In 1628 he helped to draw up the Petition of Right, and the year after he was committed to the Tower with Eliot, Holles, and the rest. After eight months' rigorous imprisonment he was transferred to the Marshalsea, but soon after was released through the favour of Laud, whereupon he retired to Wrest in Bedfordshire, the seat of the Earl of Kent. In 1640 he was chosen member of the Long Parliament for the university of Oxford; and now, when the struggle between the king and the nation began to point towards the fatal rupture, he was suspected of not being zealous enough by such as were themselves perhaps overzealous. Already in 1635 he had dedicated to the king his Mare Clausum (an answer to the Mare Liberum of Grotius and the Dutch claims to fish off the British coasts), and there is evidence that Charles personally looked on him with favour. Selden was one of the committee of twenty-four appointed to draw up a remonstrance, and at this point his path first diverged from that of Hyde, yet without their friendship being impaired. He opposed vigorously the policy that led to the expulsion of the bishops from the House of Lords, and finally to the abolition of Episcopacy. Yet he adhered in the main to the cause of the parliament, driven by the complete arbitrariness of the king's later measures. He took no direct part in the impeachment of Strafford and voted against the Attainder Bill, and, though he furnished precedents for the measures taken against Laud, had no share in his prosecution.
He sat as a lay-member in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (1643), and perplexed his clerical colleagues sadly with his irony and his learning. Soon after he was appointed keeper of the rolls and records in the Tower. In 1644 he was appointed one of the twelve commissioners of the Admiralty, and elected master of Trinity Hall at Cambridge, which office he declined. In 1646 he subscribed the Covenant, and the year after the sum of £5000 was voted to him by parliament in consideration of his services and sufferings. In 1647 he was appointed one of the university visitors, and always used his influence to moderate the tyranny of his fanatical colleagues. One of his last public acts was to join in the last effort for a reconciliation between the king and the parliament. After the execution of Charles, of which it is certain he strongly disapproved as both unlawful and inexpedient, he took little share in public matters; and when requested by Cromwell to answer the Eikon Basilike, he refused. His death occurred at Whitefriars, November 30, 1654, and he was buried in the Temple Church, London. His last years he had spent in the house of Elizabeth, dowager-countess of Kent, with whom, between her husband's death in 1639 and her own in 1651, the intimacy had been so great as to colour Aubrey's statement that they were privately married. He left about £40,000; his 8000 books were given by his executors to the Bodleian. The principal writings of Selden, besides those already mentioned, are: Marmora Arundeliana (1628); De Successionibus in Bona Defuncti secundum Leges Ebræorum (1634); De Jure Naturali et Gentium, juxta Disciplinam Ebræorum (1640), a work more learned than critical, like most of Selden's biblical productions, who thought far too much of the opinions of the Rabbins; Uxor Ebraica; and De Synedrīs et Præfecturis Juridicis Ebræorum (1650 et seq.); besides a great variety of posthumous tracts and treatises, of which the most famous, and also the most valuable, is his Table-talk, recorded and published by his amanuensis, Richard Milward, in 1689 (ed. by Singer, 1847, and by Reynolds, 1892). Of this Coleridge says, with some exaggeration, however: 'There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I can find in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer.' Selden's best character stands in the gallery of Clarendon, who adds excellently: 'His style in all his writings seems harsh, and sometimes obscure; which is not wholly to be imputed to the abstract subjects of which he commonly treated, out of the paths trod by other men, but to a little undervaluing the beauty of a style, and too much propensity to the language of antiquity; but in his conversation he was the most clear discourser, and had the best faculty in making hard things easy and present to the understanding, of any man that hath been known.' Selden's works were collected and published at London in three folio vols. (1726).
See Singer's Biographical Preface, Dr John Aikin's Lives of Selden and Usher (1811), and G. W. Johnson's Memoir (1835). The Selden Society was founded in 1887 for promoting the study of English legal history.