Overview

Love, Hate, and the Law in Tudor England reconstructs the life of Ralph Rishton, a member of the sixteenth-century Lancashire gentry who was a child bridegroom and a serial wife-discarder, who bribed church officials to obtain a forged annulment, defrauded a kinsman out of his inheritance, and adroitly manipulated his own and other people's land. The dozens of lawsuits in which the Rishtons were involved, in many different courts, elucidate one family's engagement with law in Tudor England: how they used and misused law, how it shaped their perceptions of rights and mutual obligations, and how it framed litigants' and witnesses' language. Drawing upon trial and estate records, the core of this study is the central narrative of Ralph Rishton's three wives, of litigiousness and violence, marriage and property, and the pursuit of equitable resolutions to disputes, along with countless smaller narratives that vividly capture a culture in its time and place. Alongside that central narrative, L. R. Poos uses the Rishton stories as a starting-point to analyse child marriage, the construction of memory, and the development of local historical identity through antiquarians and the Victorian and Edwardian local press, demonstrating how - from the time of the Rishtons into the twentieth century - historical narratives were continually reshaped and repurposed.

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9780192865113

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Reviews

It is an exceptional-and exceptionally interesting-case study throwing a spotlight on to early-modern law, and how it was used 'to negotiate dilemmas towards desired goals'... The story is told in a lively and accessible way, most often through the written-down words. * William D.Shannon, Local Historian *

Author Information

L. R. Poos is a graduate of Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. He was a fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (1980-1983) and since 1983 has been a member of the faculty of the Department of History at The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, where he also served as Dean of Arts and Sciences (2002-2014). His research focuses upon late-medieval and early-modern England, and the history of family, law, and rural society. His other interests include digital humanities (especially Geographical Information Systems), global food history, and early Japanese history.

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