In Town Courts and Urban Society in Late Medieval England, 1250–1500, editors Richard Goddard and Teresa Phipps use “town court” as an umbrella term for a range of bodies and, accordingly, take on the ambitious task of providing an introduction to a wide variety of legal records. This collection of essays does not assume a high level of knowledge of the medieval legal system, and those seeking an introduction will find Marianne Kowaleski's chapter particularly valuable, outlining the background to the nature of the courts and their development over time. She also contributes a useful appendix listing publications of town court records, with a description of the precise contents of each.
Although sharing a common evidence base, the contributing authors apply it to a variety of purposes. Some contributions focus on the compilation of the records themselves. Esther Liberman Cuenca considers the selection of court cases for inclusion in custumals, seemingly chosen to demonstrate procedures and punishments for future hearings, to delineate the jurisdiction of the court, and to emphasize the role of civic officials as lawmakers. Likewise, Jeremy Goldberg explores the crafting of language in testimonies, finding references to literature and contemporary political events being used to depict litigants’ characters in a positive or negative light. Other chapters use the records as a tool for exploring society. Susan Maddock looks at court office holding in the context of Lynn, a town in which there was rivalry between two tiers of burgesses, known as artificer-burgesses and merchant-burgesses.
One of the most valuable contributions comes from Phipps, as it has significant implications for the functioning of English law beyond the venue of the town court. Phipps investigates the legal experiences of women through the detailed study of one Agnes Halum, a particularly litigious resident of Nottingham. Phipps shows the blurred lines between the two legal statuses of femme covert, in which a woman was covered by her husband, and femme sole. The latter was not reserved for unmarried women but was up for negotiation by litigants who played an active role in shaping customs regarding its application in court cases.
Christopher Dyer draws attention to the varied nature of jurisdiction under seigneurial lords. His detailed look at Shipston-on-Stour and Bromsgrove, two new towns formed by Worcester cathedral priory, provokes broad questions about lordship. Dyer interprets seigneurial lords’ robust enforcement of their jurisdiction as being partly to protect their incomes but also the result of a belief that lordship was a “positive good” (114). Yet if an ethos of lordship was as important as practical benefits, why did certain categories of lord adhere to this more than others? The chapter opens the door for future research into the ideology of lordship. Samantha Sagui's chapter explores middling-status inhabitants’ service as capital pledges. Her detailed exploration of the formal processes of the Norwich leet court raises questions about the less formal ones. How were the duties shared between the twelve capital pledges, and, given that the court met annually, what processes existed for recording offenses throughout the year? Only two of the eleven rolls date from the late fourteenth century, so some caution is needed in the Sagui's discussion of post-Black Death trends. Three types of case do, however, have substantially more business in the two later rolls: trading without the freedom of the city, public nuisances, and nonattendance at the court. Sagui attributes the late survival of the Norwich leet court to its revenue potential, and it would be interesting to know why other cities did not exploit it in the same way.
Richard Goddard's contribution is a considered exploration of the value of social network analysis to the study of medieval business networks. It tackles the important issue of precisely what the links in a network actually represent. Rather than assuming the links formed a network of trusted contacts, Goddard makes a strong case that the reliance on the formal mechanisms of court litigation reflects a lack of personal trust in business dealings. His use of measures of centrality focuses heavily on the centrality of individuals, forcing him to make qualifications about how their scores are skewed to an extent by the nature of the source material. An analysis of the average centrality of groups of people, such as officeholders versus non-office-holders, would be one way to compensate for this problem.
Alan Kissane looks into pleas of Writ de Recto, relating to property disputes. A key finding is that, following the Black Death, litigants increasingly chose electors with connections to the borough court rather than their local parish. Kissane frames this as part of a post-Black Death move toward urban oligarchy, with officialdom and procedures coming into the hands of the few. In a recent article, I argue that oligarchy not only entails rule by the few but also carries connotations of a governing elite detached from lower-status residents (Joe Chick, “Urban Oligarchy and Dissolutioned Voters: The End of Monastic Rule in Reading, 1350–1600,” Cultural and Social History 16, no. 4 [2019]: 387–411). Kissane's evidence would suggest the very opposite: a narrowing group of electors selected by the litigants themselves, not imposed on them.
Jane Laughton's contribution examines the strong survival of judicial records in Chester, which exemplify the fragmented nature of the medieval judiciary. Despite the securing of autonomous civic courts, six manors existed within the town with their own courts that undermined the civic government's control of justice. Laughton takes a very different view of oligarchy to Kissane, noting how the process of climbing the civic ladder brought individuals into regular contact with lower-status inhabitants. Rather than forming a detached oligarchic group, they gained awareness of the issues in their town.
Goddard and Phipps set out to provide researchers with an understanding of a type of source that has been underused in history, and this book successfully provides a valuable guide. As they themselves emphasize, there are many more lines of inquiry that future researchers could pursue with these records. The differing views of contributors as to whether they show the oligarchic tendencies of officials or give examples of interaction across the social spectrum is one such debate that this volume opens rather than settles.
