Learn English – Structure of ‘Be you never so high…’

grammaticalityverbs

In an English High Court case in 1977, the late Lord Denning summed up the gist of the
principle of the rule of law when he said:

To every subject in this land, no matter how powerful, I would use Thomas Fuller’s
words over 300 years ago: ‘Be you never so high, the law is above you.’

Source: P7, How the Law Works, Gary Slapper

I know that Thomas Fuller lived in the 1600s, but still want to learn about the grammar and structure.

  1. What form is be in; it looks the English present subjunctive?

  2. How to anatomize/parse/unravel Be you never?
    I can guess the meaning here as "Even if you were so high…"

Best Answer

You have guessed very well, and arrived at the meaning.

  • Be here is indeed the old subjunctive, now used only in mandatives (“...ordered that he be released...”). Its former use as a conditional is no longer productive; it lingers today only in some traditional and fossilized expressions (“...be he alive or be he dead”).

  • Never here, as oerkelens observes, is a negative form of ever in its oldest sense of “at every time, in every degree”—the same ever found in whatever, however, whoever, &c. This is another fossilized use: never has been substituted for ever in conditional clauses bearing a sense of negation since the waning days of Old English. Today we would express this negative sense with an -ever compound or, as you suggest, with even:

    However high you are, the law is still above you.
    Even if you are ever so high, the law is still above you.

Related Topic