Cuenca's "Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England"

Esther Liberman Cuenca has published The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England (Oxford University Press):

Drawing on a quantitative analysis of hundreds of printed and archival sources from 77 towns, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval England is the first cross-regional investigation into the history of urban customs since Mary Bateson's seminal, two-volume work Borough Customs (1904-1906). In contrast to English common law and church law, which both had long institutional and academic traditions devoted to training men in their legal philosophies, customary law constituted local practices that acquired the force of law over time. Urban customary law regulated political officeholding, trade, property holding, and even moral behaviour in English towns.

The Making of Urban Customary Law argues that urban customs, which governed the lives of people in English towns, were crucial to the development of a distinct, bourgeois identity in England-an evolution that this new study tracks from the early twelfth to the late sixteenth centuries. In the years following the Black Death, and especially during the Reformation period, this law became more concerned with defining political authority, maintaining morality, and articulating a consensus about the “common good” for townspeople.

This book makes two principal claims: First, customary law advanced the business interests of an urban oligarchy. These were urban (male) elites who drafted laws and obtained privileges to enhance their wealth and assert their political independence from local lords, and often made claims about the legitimacy of their privileges or laws by rooted them in history or some kind of ancestral past. These lawmakers also made considerable efforts to establish their identities as morally upright and even-handed patriarchs. In so doing, urban customary law played a central role in the development of a distinct bourgeois identity in medieval and Reformation England. Second, this law lent particular meanings to the “common good” in towns, as it helped these lawmakers articulate policies that cohered to their vision of an ideal civic community.

--Dan Ernst

Johnson on soothsayers and legal culture in medieval England

 Tom Johnson (University of York) has published the following article: "Soothsayers, Legal Culture, and the Politics of Truth in Late-Medieval England," Cultural and Social History (published online on 31 Aug. 2020). Here's the abstract: 

Soothsaying or divination has generally been understood by historians within the context of magic, popular culture, and lay religion. This article considers what it might be able to tell us about legal culture in late-medieval England. It argues that soothsayers not only offered people an alternative to the pursuit of justice in law-courts, but also different means of conceiving what justice was: they did not necessarily aim at the conclusion of peace between parties, but rather claimed to unveil the truth. Elaborating this comparison, it argues that this casts a different light on the publicity of late-medieval legal culture.

Further information is available here.

--Mitra Sharafi 

Festschrift on Late Medieval Monarchy, Political Culture and the State

Just out from York Medieval Press (and Boyden & Brewer) is Monarchy, State and Political Culture in Late Medieval England: Essays in Honour of W. Mark Ormrod, edited by Gwilym Dodd, Associate Professor of History, University of Nottingham, and Craig Taylor, Reader in Medieval History at the University of York:

The essays collected here celebrate mark the distinguished career of Professor W. Mark Ormrod, reflecting the vibrancy and range of his scholarship on the structures, personalities and culture of ruling late medieval England. Encompassing political, administrative, Church and social history, the volume focusses on three main themes: monarchy, state and political culture. For the first, it explores Edward III's reactions to the deaths of his kinfolk and cases of political defamation across the fourteenth century. The workings of the "state" are examined through studies of tax and ecclesiastical records, the Court of Chivalry, fifteenth-century legislation, and the working practices of the privy seal clerk, Thomas Hoccleve. Finally, separate discussions of collegiate statutes and the household ordinances of Cecily, duchess of York consider the political culture of regulation and code-making.

The contributors are Elizabeth Biggs, James Bothwell, Gwilym Dodd, Helen Killick, Helen Lacey, Joanna Laynesmith, Jonathan Mackman, Anthony Musson, Sarah Rees Jones, and E.H. Watt.  The blog of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York has a brief notice on Professor Ormond and the launch for the festschrift.

--Dan Ernst

Weekend Roundup

• William & Mary Law School has a nice profile of Thomas J. McSweeney on the publication of his book, Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law’s First Professionals.  An earlier interview is here.

• Over at the Talking Legal History, Siobhan M. M. Barco talks with Gregory P. Downs, University of California, Davis, about his book The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 

• The American Political Development blog A House Divided is running a symposium on Corey Robin's The Enigma of Clarence Thomas. Here's a recent post by Melissa Murray (New York University School of Law) on the importance of surfacing Thomas's historical views of the black matriarch, alongside his views of the black patriarch, and how "Thomas’s view of race, patriarchy, and conservatism converge in his understanding of reproductive rights."

• From HNN: Jennifer Wells, George Washington University, on her path to a professional career in history (after law school) and “some tips for current students considering graduate work in history and law.”

• Last Thursday, Touro Law sponsored a symposium on the life and legacy of Charles A. Reich. [KMT: I tweeted some threads about the presentations, available here.]

• Brenda Wineapple will speak on her book The Impeachers: The Trial of Andre Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation at the Franklin Roosevelt Library and Museum at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, February 12, 2020.  Also, on February 15, the Library presents “Presidential Leadership: Lincoln & Roosevelt" with Harold Holzer and Craig Symonds.  More.

• From the Washington Post's "Made by History" Section: Robert L. Tsai (American University) on "How activists resisted — and ultimately overturned — an unjust Supreme Court decision"; William M. Treanor (Georgetown University Law Center) on how "Trump’s attorneys have butchered a crucial Founder’s take on impeachment"; Shobana Shankar (Stony Brook University) on why Mississippi can't fix its prisons, without recognizing "their dehumanizing, eugenic roots"; Christine Johnson (Washington University in Saint Louis) on why "Trump’s impeachment trial is no witch hunt"; and more.

• ICYMI: Supreme Court archives catalogue the history of Queens.  Ian Burney on the history of innocence at Stony Brook.  Berkeley Law removes Boalt's name (LA Times).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

Johnson on late medieval English legal cultures

Tom Johnson (University of York) has published Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England with Oxford University Press. From the publisher: 

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 understanding this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. Tom Johnson first explores four 'local legal cultures' - in the countryside, in forests, in towns and cities, and in the maritime world- that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law.

Johnson then 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, the volume 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 with, and through legality.

Here's the Table 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

Further information is available here. 

--Mitra Sharafi