Law in Common

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Common People ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
Economic Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Law ◽  
Late Medieval England

There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of ‘legal pluralism’. Law in Common provides a way of apprehending this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. The first half of the book explores four ‘local legal cultures’ – in the countryside, towns and cities, the maritime world, and Forests – that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law. The second half of the book turns to examine ‘common legalities’, widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English as a legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, it offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives. Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century through legality.

Legal English and the Vernacularization of Law

Law in Common ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 213-240
Author(s):  
Tom Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
Legal Language ◽  
Common People ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Third ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Medieval England

This chapter explores the growing use of English as a written ‘legal vernacular’ over the course of the fifteenth century. It argues that one can only understand the emergence of vernacular writing in legal discourse by looking to the local contexts of legal production. The emergence of English as a legal vernacular did not take hold uniformly across late-medieval society, and so we need to think more carefully about the specific kinds of discursive value that it held; the chapter argues that, as a legal language, English worked as a signifier of authenticity, a mode of signalling fidelity to real speech, and as a way of gesturing towards wider audiences or publics. This leads to the third argument that the growing significance granted to English as a legal language affected common people in late-medieval England in ambivalent ways. While in some ways the processes of vernacularization in the fifteenth century seem to follow a trajectory towards a more inclusive public discourse, as the ‘common tongue’ spoken by the majority of the populace became a language appropriate for expressing ideas about legitimacy, it was ultimately constrained by the relatively limited modes in which English was allowed to be legal.

Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England

1994 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 430-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gervase Rosser
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Voluntary Association ◽  
The Social ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Medieval England ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

In the history of medieval ideas about community, a prominent place must be accorded to the fraternity, or guild. This type of voluntary association, found throughout medieval Europe, frequently applied to itself the name of communitas. The community of the guild was not, however, a simple phenomenon; it invites closer analysis than it has yet received. As religious clubs of mostly lay men and (often) women, the fraternities of medieval Christendom have lately been a favored subject among students of spirituality. Less interest, however, has recently been shown in the social aspects of the guilds. One reason for this neglect may be precisely the communitarian emphasis in the normative records of these societies, which most late twentieth-century historians find unrealistic and, perhaps, faintly embarrassing. But allowing, as it must be allowed, that medieval society was not the Edenic commune evoked in fraternity statutes, the social historian is left with some substantial questions concerning these organizations, whose number alone commands attention: fifteenth-century England probably contained 30,000 guilds. Why were so many people eager to pay subscriptions—which, though usually modest, were not insignificant—to be admitted as “brothers” and “sisters” of one or more fraternities? Who attended guild meetings, and what did they hope to achieve by doing so? What social realities gave rise to the common language of equal brotherhood? This essay is intended to shed some light on these questions by focusing on what for every guild was the event which above all gave it visible definition: the annual celebration of the patronal feast day.

Dean Phillip Bell. Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in Fifteenth-Century Germany. Studies in Central European Histories. Leiden: Brill, 2001. xii, 301 pp.

AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-175
Author(s):  
Elisheva Carlebach
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social History ◽  
Christian Identity ◽  
Bubonic Plague ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Central European ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
History Of ◽  
German Jewish

German Jewish communities underwent momentous changes in status, composition, and character during the fifteenth century, yet apart from its intellectual legacy, this period has merited scant attention from historians. Even contemporaries viewed the post-plague German communities as a diminished and spent shadow of their vital medieval Ashkenazic predecessors, and historiography has maintained this perception. Scholars characterized the period as one of intellectual decline, population shrinkage and expulsion from the remaining cities that had not destroyed or expelled their Jewish communities during the bubonic plague depredations. Despite the real devastation caused by the fourteenth-century chaos, much vibrant life remained within German Jewish communities. Little has been written, particularly in English, concerning the reasons for subsequent Christian resistance to the presence of Jews and the effects of new Christian conceptions of their own communities on Jewish self-perception. Bell's book intends to fill this gap. Neither a social history, nor an intellectual history of fifteenth-century Germans and Jews, it is a pioneering attempt to track the changing definitions of Jewish and Christian identity in the fifteenth century. It is an ambitious enterprise.

Spouses, Siblings and Surnames: Reconstructing Families From Medieval Village Court Rolls

1983 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith M. Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Quantitative Methods ◽  
Common People ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Never Married ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Early Modern Era

Advocates of the “new social history” have buttressed their efforts to recreate the past lives of ordinary people with concepts, models, and quantitative methods taken from the social sciences. These new approaches have allowed scholars to extract vivid and dynamic reconstructions of past human experiences from the dry folios of civil and ecclesiastical registers. Their successes, as exemplified by the many publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have focused largely on the demographic and familial histories of the early modern era. The manipulation of parish listings of baptisms, marriages, and burials is now a fairly precise science that has taught us much (and will doubtless teach us more) about the daily lives of common people and their families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But the tracing into the past of the social, familial, and demographic characteristics of the English people need not start abruptly with the auspicious advent of parish registers in 1538. Indeed, we can only hope to trace the origins of fundamental features of Tudor-Stuart life (such as the pronounced tendency towards late marriage and the high incidence of persons who never married) if we develop accurate techniques for analyzing the pre-1500, pre-parish register materials at our disposal. From the perspective of a medievalist, this work is clearly essential; most medieval people, quite simply, were peasants, and we shall better understand the histories of medieval parliaments, towns, and universities when we have successfully uncovered their rural underpinnings.

‘For the Increase of Divine Service’: Chantries in the Parish in Late Medieval Bristol

1985 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Burgess
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Common People ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
The Common ◽  
Late Medieval England

While it is incontrovertible that the Catholic faith exercised a profound influence on the lives of the common people of fifteenth-century England, it is equally apparent that many aspects of contemporary belief and practice will never be wholly clear. This is not simply for want of evidence but more the result of the limitations of the sources. It may, for instance, be assumed that contemporaries' religious priorities would be illuminated by close examination of their wills since these documents almost invariably deal with pious provisions intended to benefit testators' souls. But tolerably represented by surviving wills as the wealthy and town-dwelling classes of late medieval England are, analysis of these documents is treacherous. Just as the scribes who registered them certainly standardised the presentation of different testators' wishes, so probate procedures militated against even faintly unorthodox expression. Moreover, the proportion of a testator's movable or immovable estate represented in any given will is impossible to gauge, as a result of which no measure may be taken of any testator's devotion by comparison of his religious bequests with those made for other purposes. It must also be remembered that wills reveal nothing of the pious provision that testators undoubtedly made during their lifetimes for their own benefit. Neither do they convey any impression of what family or friends may have agreed to discharge for the benefit of a testator's soul. Late medieval wills are undeniably disappointing and frequently misleading.

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