Law, Lawyers and Litigants in Early Modern England

Essays in Memory of Christopher W. Brooks

Michael Lobban, Joanne Begiato, Adrian Green

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781108491723
• eBook ISBN: 9781108754118
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Written in memory of Christopher W. Brooks, this collection of essays by prominent historians examines and builds on the scholarly legacy of the leading historian of early modern English law, society and politics. Brooks's work put legal culture and legal consciousness at the centre of our understanding of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English society, and the English common law tradition. The essays presented here develop a number of strands found in his work, and take them in new directions. They shed new light on central debates in the history of the common law, exploring how law was understood and used by different communities in early modern England, and examining how and why people engaged (or did not engage) in litigation. The volume also contains two hitherto unpublished essays by Christopher Brooks, which consider the relationship between law and religion and between law and political revolution in seventeenth-century England.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Frontispiece
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Christopher Brooks’s Contribution to Early Modern History
• 3 Law, Law-Consciousness and Lawyers as Constitutive of Early Modern England: Christopher W. Brooks’s Singular Journey
• 4 ‘The Hard Rind of Legal History’: F. W. Maitland and the Writing of Late Medieval and Early Modern British Social History
• 5 Fountains of Justice: James I, Charles I and Equity
• 6 The Inns of Court, Renaissance and the Language of Modernity
• 7 The Micro-Spatial Dynamics of Litigation: The Chilvers Coton Tithe Dispute, Barrows vs. Archer (1657)
• 8 ‘Law-Mindedness’: Crowds, Courts and Popular Knowledge of the Law in Early Modern England
• 9 Local Laws, Local Principles: The Paradoxes of Local Legal Processes in Early Modern England
• 10 ‘So Now You Are Wed Enough’: Clandestine Unions in the North-West of England in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
• 11 ‘Blunderers and Blotters of the Law?’: The Rise of Conveyancing in the Eighteenth Century and Long-Term Socio-Legal Change
• 12 England and America: The Role of the Justice of the Peace in County Durham, England, and Richmond County, Virginia, in the Eighteenth Century
• 13 Law and Architecture in Early Modern Durham
• 14 Law and Revolution: The Seventeenth-Century English Example
• 15 Religion and Law in Early Modern England
• A Bibliography of the Works of Christopher W. Brooks
• Index