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Law in Common draws on a large body of unpublished archival material from local archives and libraries across the country, to show how ordinary people in the later Middle Ages - such as peasants, craftsmen, and townspeople - used law in their everyday lives, developing our understanding of the operation of late-medieval society and politics.
List of contents
- Introduction: Local Legal Cultures and Common Legalities in Late-Medieval England
- Part I: Local Legal Cultures
- 1: Rural Legal Culture: Ordaining Community
- 2: Urban Legal Culture: Institutional Density
- 3: Maritime Legal Culture: Expertise and Authority
- 4: Forest Legal Culture: Accounting for Vert and Venison
- Part II: Common Legalities
- 5: The Legal Landscape
- 6: The Economy of Legitimate Knowledge
- 7: Legal English and the Vernacularization of Law
- 8: Common Legal Documents
- Conclusion: Towards a Common Constitution
- Bibliography
About the author
Tom Johnson grew up in Ipswich. He completed degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, and his doctoral work at Birkbeck, University of London. He held a junior research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before joining the University of York as a Lecturer in Late Medieval History. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow at The Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.
Summary
Law in Common draws on a large body of unpublished archival material from local archives and libraries across the country, to show how ordinary people in the later Middle Ages - such as peasants, craftsmen, and townspeople - used law in their everyday lives, developing our understanding of the operation of late-medieval society and politics.
Additional text
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.
