I’d like to thank Mitra for inviting me to act as a guest blogger for July 2021. It’s been a strange year, for many obvious reasons, but it was also the year I published my first book. So I have enjoyed having the opportunity to reflect on the research that underlay and eventually came out of it, with a little more critical distance. In keeping with an approach that I am trialling at the moment, and the looser format provided by a blog, I have decided to include some pictures; these are intended to complement the text, rather than to illustrate it, and as such, they are left uncaptioned. All of the images are either in the public domain, or have been permitted for non-commercial reproduction.
I must confess that when I sat down to think about what I would
write for the blog, I found myself hesitating. The truth is, I’ve always felt a bit of an
imposter when invited into the hallowed corridors of Legal History. I have no
legal training or qualifications; I trained in a history department as a social
historian. Legal scholarship can seem unerringly serious and intellectual – a
far cry from the tavern-talk and marriage rites of medieval social history. When I read legal history, I often feel like I’m missing something
crucial, a grown-up conversation taking place over my head.
So I call myself a social historian of law. This is a little less straightforward, perhaps, but it signals where my true loyalties lie. I first started graduate work because I was interested in what non-elite people in late-medieval England – peasants, craftspeople, labourers – made of their lives: how they lived, what was important to them, how they thought about the world. I first began contemplating legal institutions not for their own sake, but for the rich records they created during this period. Court records presented a means of reaching those people, who left so few documentary traces of their own.
But of course, research takes its own paths. As I explored
the records of the local courts held in fifteenth-century villages, towns,
ports, markets and parish churches, it grew increasingly obvious that these
institutions played a crucial role in the ordering of everyday life. They were
not merely a window on to the “social”: they were a part of it. And so I
realized that in order to understand that social world, I would have to begin
to understand more of the law of which it was composed. The result, ten years
later, was my first book, Law
in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford University Press,
2020).
