Overview

There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of 'legal pluralism'. Law in Common provides a way of understanding this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. Tom Johnson first explores four 'local legal cultures'—in the countryside, in forests, in towns and cities, and in the maritime world—that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law. Johnson then turns to examine 'common legalities', widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English as a legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, the volume offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives.Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century with, and through, legality.

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9780198926832

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Reviews

"Johnson presents a valuable new approach to the study of legal history and the study of historical legal records for social history, and offers valuable insights into each of the constituent parts that make up the study. * Euan C. Roger, Nottingham Medieval Studies * In freeing medieval law and legality from the confines of conventional legal history, Law in Common offers an astonishingly inventive and stimulating new perspective on the social, political, and material world of fifteenth-century England. It is a major achievement. * Rowan Dorin, The Medieval Review * There is much of interest in this volume...this book is going to be essential for anyone interested in local courts in late medieval England and the evidence they provide for how common people interacted with the law. * Paul Brand, Speculum * [A] magisterial study of English legal cultures in the long fifteenth century...combining the legal historian's rigorous knowledge of ""the system"" with a social and cultural historical curiosity for the practices and experiences of non-elites. * Frans Camphuijsen, Journal of British Studies *"

Author Information

Tom Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval History at the University of York. He completed his doctoral work at Birkbeck, University of London, and has held research fellowships at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.

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