The essays in Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150-1900 all reflect the wider concept of legal history - how legal processes fitted into the social and political life of the community and how courts and other legal processes were used by contemporaries. In doing so they aim both to justify the study of legal history in its own right and to show how legal records, including those of a variety of central and local courts, can be used to further our understanding of a wide range of social, commercial, popular and political history.
Shortlisted for the 2015 Katharine Briggs Award This is a study of law, wrongdoing and justice as conceived in the minds of the ordinary people of England and Wales from the later eighteenth century to the First World War. Official justice was to become increasingly centralised with declining traditional courts, emerging professional policing and a new prison estate. However, popular concepts of what was, or should be, contained within the law were often at variance with its formal written content. Communities continued to hold mock courts, stage shaming processions and burn effigies of wrongdoers. The author investigates those justice rituals, the actors, the victims and the offences that occasioned them. He also considers the role such practices played in resistive communities trying to preserve their identity and assert their independence. Finally, whilst documenting the decline of popular justice traditions this book demonstrates that they were nevertheless important in bequeathing a powerful set of symbols and practices to the nascent labour movement. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of legal history and criminal justice as well as social and cultural history in what could be considered a very long nineteenth century. Stephen Banks is an associate professor in criminal law, criminal justice and legal history at the University of Reading, co-director of the Forum for Legal and Historical Research and author of A Polite Exchange of Bullets: The Duel and the English Gentleman, 1750-1850 (The Boydell Press, 2010).
'Community' and 'justice' recur in anthropological, historical, and legal scholarship, yet as concepts they are notoriously slippery. Historians and lawyers look to anthropologists as 'community specialists', but anthropologists often avoid the concept through circumlocution: although much used (and abused) by historians, legal thinkers, and political philosophers, the term remains strikingly indeterminate and often morally overdetermined. 'Justice', meanwhile, is elusive, alternately invoked as the goal of contemporary political theorizing, and wrapped in obscure philosophical controversy. A conceptual knot emerges in much legal and political thought between law, justice, and community, but theories abound, without any agreement over concepts. The contributors to this volume use empirical case studies to unpick threads of this knot. Local codes from Anglo-Saxon England, north Africa, and medieval Armenia indicate disjunctions between community boundaries and the subjects of local rules and categories; processes of justice from early modern Europe to eastern Tibet suggest new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between law and justice; and practices of exile that recur throughout the world illustrate contingent formulations of community. In the first book in the series, Legalism: Anthropology and History, law was addressed through a focus on local legal categories as conceptual tools. Here this approach is extended to the ideas and ideals of justice and community. Rigorous cross-cultural comparison allows the contributors to avoid normative assumptions, while opening new avenues of inquiry for lawyers, anthropologists, and historians alike.
Popular belief holds that throwing the contents of a chamber pot into the street was a common occurrence during the early modern period. This book challenges this deeply entrenched stereotypical image as the majority of urban inhabitants and their local governors alike valued clean outdoor public spaces, vesting interest in keeping the areas in which they lived and worked clean. Taking an extensive tour of over thirty towns and cities across early modern Britain, focusing on Edinburgh and York as in-depth case studies, this book sheds light on the complex relationship between how governors organised street cleaning, managed waste disposal and regulated the cleanliness of the outdoor environment, top-down, and how typical urban inhabitants self-regulated their neighbourhoods, bottom-up. The urban-rural manure trade, sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal technology, plague epidemics, contemporary understandings of malodours and miasmatic disease transmission and urban agriculture are also analysed. This book will enable undergraduates, postgraduates and established academics to deepen their understanding of daily life and sensory experiences in the early modern British town. This innovative work will appeal to social, cultural and legal historians as well as researchers of history of medicine and public health.
This volume covers the years 1483-1558, a period of immense social, political, and intellectual changes, which profoundly affected the law and its workings. It first considers constitutional developments, and addresses the question of whether there was a rule of law under king Henry VIII. In a period of supposed despotism, and enhanced parliamentary power, protection of liberty was increasing and habeas corpus was emerging. The volume considers the extent to which the law was affected by the intellectual changes of the Renaissance, and how far the English experience differed from that of the Continent. It includes a study of the myriad jurisdictions in Tudor England and their workings; and examines important procedural changes in the central courts, which represent a revolution in the way that cases were presented and decided. The legal profession, its education, its functions, and its literature are examined, and the impact of printing upon legal learning and the role of case-law in comparison with law-school doctrine are addressed. The volume then considers the law itself. Criminal law was becoming more focused during this period as a result of doctrinal exposition in the inns of court and occasional reports of trials. After major conflicts with the Church, major adjustments were made to the benefit of clergy, and the privilege of sanctuary was all but abolished. The volume examines the law of persons in detail, addressing the impact of the abolition of monastic status, the virtual disappearance of villeinage, developments in the law of corporations, and some remarkable statements about the equality of women. The history of private law during this period is dominated by real property and particularly the Statutes of Uses and Wills (designed to protect the king's feudal income against the consequences of trusts) which are given a new interpretation. Leaseholders and copyholders came to be treated as full landowners with rights assimilated to those of freeholders. The land law of the time was highly sophisticated, and becoming more so, but it was only during this period that the beginnings of a law of chattels became discernible. There were also significant changes in the law of contract and tort, not least in the development of a satisfactory remedy for recovering debts.
This volume in 'The Oxford History of the Laws of England' covers the years 1483-1558, a period of immense social political, and intellectual changes which profoundly affected the law and its workings.
This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting -- and thus molding -- the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective. Book jacket.
Allyson May chronicles the history of the English criminal trial and the development of a criminal bar in London between 1750 and 1850. She charts the transformation of the legal process and the evolution of professional standards of conduct for the criminal bar through an examination of the working lives of the Old Bailey barristers of the period. In describing the rise of adversarialism, May uncovers the motivations and interests of prosecutors, defendants, the bench, and the state, as well as the often-maligned "Old Bailey hacks" themselves. Traditionally, the English criminal trial consisted of a relatively unstructured altercation between the victim-prosecutor and the accused, who generally appeared without a lawyer. A criminal bar had emerged in London by the 1780s, and in 1836 the Prisoners' Counsel Act recognized the defendant's right to legal counsel in felony trials and lifted many restrictions on the activities of defense lawyers. May explores the role of barristers before and after the Prisoners' Counsel Act. She also details the careers of individual members of the bar--describing their civil practice in local, customary courts as well as their criminal practice--and the promotion of Old Bailey counsel to the bench of that court. A comprehensive biographical appendix augments this discussion.
This book provides an accessible collection of translated legal sources through which the exploits of criminals and developments in the English criminal justice system (c.1215–1485) can be studied. Drawing on the wealth of archival material and an array of contemporary literary texts, it guides readers towards an understanding of prevailing notions of law and justice and expectations of the law and legal institutions. Tensions are shown emerging between theoretical ideals of justice and the practical realities of administering the law during an era profoundly affected by periodic bouts of war, political in-fighting, social dislocation and economic disaster. Introductions and notes provide both the specific and wider legal, social and political contexts in addition to offering an overview of the existing secondary literature and historiographical trends. This collection affords a valuable insight into the character of medieval governance as well as revealing the complex nexus of interests, attitudes and relationships prevailing in society during the later Middle Ages.
