Legal English and the Vernacularization of Law

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.

Forest Legal Culture

This chapter argues that Forest legal culture revolved around the management of woodland resources, principally the ‘vert and venison’ that formed the central concern of Forest law. This emphasis on management was built into the very structures of the local court that used this law, which served more as mechanisms of financial accounting than as tribunals for the resolution of disputes or the enactment of justice; it was intensified by the concerns of the specialist local officers—such as foresters, woodwards, and verderers—who were often paid in kind with timber and venison, and who were obliged to account for the way in which they cultivated and used these resources. The inhabitants of Forests, then, though they possessed significant customary rights, were thus faced with a legal regime that offered relatively little scope for the kind of idealized community-building that characterized other areas of the late-medieval countryside. Forest legal culture was not built around associative relations between people, but rather, the allocation and usage of natural resources. This worked to make law revolve around claims about the most judicious methods of conserving the Forest, a plane of argument that was tilted against tenants.

Conclusion

The conclusion briefly summarizes the arguments of the book, before going on to consider their implications for how the social and political history of late-medieval England is to be understood as a more cohesive narrative of transformation. Specifically, it suggests that the legal structures—both local legal cultures and common legalities—discussed in the book can be understood as a part of a ‘common constitution’ that emerged in post-plague society, binding people together in a shared understanding of governance, making possible the kinds of expansive claim made by late-medieval government. In this way, the conclusion gestures towards a way of writing political history of the everyday.

The Legal Landscape

This chapter argues that law had a physical presence in the landscape of late-medieval England. Legal ideas did not consist merely in words and writings, but were constituted in their concrete manifestations in the material environment; this was the terrain upon which they were articulated, contested, and resolved. People whose lives were lived so close to the land understood its signification intuitively. They knew the places in which they dwelt and worked were replete with different legal claims, some so well established by generations of institutional or customary arrangements that they formed part of the architecture of the everyday, while others remained latent in the slowly changing land, ready to become problematic if a stream were diverted, or new buildings were constructed. The existence of such claims imbued everyday mobilities with legal significance: people had to watch their step, moving through the world in ways that accorded with some claims while contesting others—droving cattle through a particular field, moving a boundary stone to its ‘proper’ place, fishing at a certain point on the river—in a legal language that was broadly comprehensible. The late-medieval landscape represented a large surface on which non-elites could make their own legal inscriptions.

Maritime Legal Culture

This chapter argues that maritime legal culture in late-medieval England was characterized by an emphasis on nautical expertise. Across the idiosyncratic and complicated legal traditions of maritime law, and the unpredictable conditions of work at sea, mariners, fishermen, shipmasters, and others conceptualized the regulation of associative relations through particular ideas about the seaworthiness of ships, skilful seamanship, and the obedience of the crew. These concepts of nautical expertise often helped to reinforce the position of shipmasters—whose expertise was officially recognized in many different ways by legal institutions—as they attempted to navigate their ships, freight the cargo of merchants, and manage a highly skilled and unusually mobile workforce; but at the same time, expertise also represented a set of broader ideals to which common mariners could appeal in order to resist the authority of shipmasters. If this jurisprudence of nautical expertise often flowed within the existing channels of domination, then, it also represented a powerful discourse that bound sundry people together in the maritime community.

Urban Legal Culture

This chapter argues that the density of law-courts deeply conditioned the way in which townspeople engaged with legal institutions in late-medieval towns. The proximity of so many legal institutions may have made it easier for townspeople to sue in the jurisdiction best suited to their litigation; but more important than any putative consumer choice were the implications of institutional density on legal authority, as it both intensified governance and opened up the possibility of its challenge. As townspeople used different urban law-courts, they helped to constitute jurisdiction in the city, routinely drawing into the relations—sometimes conflictual, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes uneasy—between different authorities. The concerns of different urban authorities with jurisdiction over space, moreover, aligned closely with those of townspeople themselves; the denser concentrations of people in towns and cities, and the changing physical shape of cities in the later Middle Ages, meant that workable arrangements for living close together had to be continually renegotiated. As such, associative relations in urban legal culture were frequently conceived in terms of spatial regulation.

Introduction

The introduction sets up the main arguments and problems of the book. It opens with three short case studies, through which we are introduced to the kinds of people who will be encountered in the book. It gradually builds up the complex picture of legal pluralism in late-medieval England, and draws this together with the broader problems facing the historiography of law and society, namely, the problem of differentiating ‘the legal’ from ‘the social’ in a model where they are mutually constitutive. It goes on to suggest two frameworks for doing this: first, through the concept of ‘local legal cultures’, as the distinctive senses of law produced within constellations of local environments, socio-economic patterns, and legal institutions; and second, through the notion of ‘common legalities’, widespread practices through which ordinary people differentiated law from the social, both inside and outside of legal institutions. Finally, it explains the extent and range of local sources used to ground the book’s arguments, and the methodology employed in reading them as texts.

Rural Legal Culture

This chapter argues that legal institutions—manorial, church, and leet or hundred courts—were deeply embedded in rural social relations. These courts had been established as the fulcrum of villagers’ legal engagement for a long time, and by the fifteenth century, rural legal culture in England was characterized by a set of profound practical and ideological correspondences between law and community. In the first place, associative relations in the late-medieval countryside were constituted by a dense lattice of mutually reinforcing legal relationships; from the bargains one made to the reputation one cultivated, law provided an epistemology of rural social life. In the second place, law framed an ethical vision of rural community, which villagers attempted to create using the mechanisms available in their local courts. These courts were often dominated by a relatively small, select group of richer families, and certainly the kinds of community that they wished to build and control were neither egalitarian nor inclusive. Yet, for all that it was hierarchical, narrow, and unrealistic, the ideal of a village united by laws served as a powerful concept for inspiring, cajoling, and enforcing action in the courts. Rural legal culture was characterized by this strong emphasis on community.

Common Legal Documents

This chapter argues that late-medieval England underwent a documentary revolution as the vast majority of the population came to possess legal writings for themselves. There were many dynamics to this transformation: some were straightforward continuations of earlier cultural developments, while others derived from new impulses within post-plague society, such as the tumultuous land market, and the growing ambition of government. This enabled many more people to do things with writing. While they had long encountered legal writings passively—hearing charters read aloud, seeing the compilation of court records, or swearing oaths on the gospels, for example—in the later Middle Ages their ownership of documents allowed them to pursue their own legal aims. This can be seen particularly in the proliferation of supplicatory writings that directly requested justice from remote authorities, but more generally in the ways that people used various documents in creative attempts to circumvent, cajole, or manipulate court process. Yet this rising tide of documents served ultimately to constrain their flexibility of legal action. Documents subtly bound people to legal institutions in new ways. More people may have held more documents, but their documents came to hold them.

The Economy of Legitimate Knowledge

This chapter looks at the ways in which common people participated in legal institutions as jurors, witnesses, and as part of a more general ‘common opinion’. It argues that as institutions asked people to produce information for the purposes of governance, those who performed this work requested, in return, some effective responses to their local problems. This institutional demand for knowledge thus opened up a space of negotiation in which common people were able to exert some pressure on the terms of their own governance. The chapter examines the range of forms of ‘knowledge work’ that legal institutions asked people to perform, from the mnemonic labour of remembering to the deliberative tasks of evaluating and inquiring, and argues that the laboriousness of this work helped to legitimate the knowledge it produced. It then turns to look at what people wanted from their negotiations over knowledge. Supplying information was a way for people to establish their credibility, to belong to an influential group, and to perform an ethical duty; it could also be a powerful stimulus for collective action, and to effect material change to living conditions, rents and dues, and local infrastructure. Considering these spirals of information through the anachronistic heuristic of economy and work, this chapter aims to draw attention to the ways that people found out information from legal institutions, and how such communications affected the way that those institutions operated.