Overview

Drawing on a quantitative analysis of hundreds of printed and archival sources from 77 towns, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval England is the first cross-regional investigation into the history of urban customs since Mary Bateson's seminal, two-volume work Borough Customs (1904-1906). In contrast to English common law and church law, which both had long institutional and academic traditions devoted to training men in their legal philosophies, customary law constituted local practices that acquired the force of law over time. Urban customary law regulated political officeholding, trade, property holding, and even moral behaviour in English towns. The Making of Urban Customary Law argues that urban customs, which governed the lives of people in English towns, were crucial to the development of a distinct, bourgeois identity in England-an evolution that this new study tracks from the early twelfth to the late sixteenth centuries. In the years following the Black Death, and especially during the Reformation period, this law became more concerned with defining political authority, maintaining morality, and articulating a consensus about the

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9780198916772

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Esther Liberman Cuenca received her PhD in History from Fordham University and is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Victoria in Victoria, Texas. She is an editor of the undergraduate textbook, Law, Justice, and Society in the Medieval World: An Introduction through Film (Fordham Press, 2025), and her essays have appeared in Urban History, The Paris Review, Continuity and Change, and Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques. She has received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, Medieval Academy of America, and American Philosophical Society. In 2022/23, she was a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

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