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Law in Common draws on a large body of unpublished archival material from local archives and libraries across the country, to show how ordinary people in the later Middle Ages - such as peasants, craftsmen, and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 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.
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Law in Common draws on a large body of unpublished archival material from local archives and libraries across the country, to show how ordinary people in the later Middle Ages - such as peasants, craftsmen, and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
[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.
