| Description |
1 online resource (xii, 324 pages) |
| Contents |
Part I. Local legal cultures -- Rural legal culture : ordaining community -- Urban legal culture : institutional density -- Maritime legal culture : expertise and authority -- Forest legal culture : accounting for vert and venison -- Part II. Common legalities -- The legal landscape -- The economy of legitimate knowledge -- Legal English and the vernacularization of law -- Common legal documents -- Conclusion: Towards a common constitution |
| Summary |
"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"--Publisher's description |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Audience |
Specialized |
| Notes |
Online resource; title from web page (Oxford Scholarship Online, viewed on June 17, 2020) |
| Subject |
Law -- England -- History -- To 1500
|
|
Sociological jurisprudence -- England -- History -- To 1500
|
|
Law, Medieval.
|
|
Law.
|
|
Law, Medieval.
|
|
Sociological jurisprudence.
|
|
England.
|
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books
|
|
History.
|
| Form |
Electronic book
|
| ISBN |
9780191827464 |
|
0191827460 |
|
