Love, Hate, and the Law in Tudor England: The Three Wives of Ralph Rishton

Author: L.R. Poos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780192865113
Published In: July 2022
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Description
Contents

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Love, Hate, and the Law in Tudor England reconstructs the life of Ralph Rishton, a member of the sixteenth-century Lancashire gentry who was a child bridegroom and a serial wife-discarder, who bribed church officials to obtain a forged annulment, defrauded a kinsman out of his inheritance, and adroitly manipulated his own and other people's land. The dozens of lawsuits in which the Rishtons were involved, in many different courts, elucidate one family's engagement with law in Tudor England: how they used and misused law, how it shaped their perceptions of rights and mutual obligations, and how it framed litigants' and witnesses' language. Drawing upon trial and estate records, the core of this study is the central narrative of Ralph Rishton's three wives, of litigiousness and violence, marriage and property, and the pursuit of equitable resolutions to disputes, along with countless smaller narratives that vividly capture a culture in its time and place.

Alongside that central narrative, L.R. Poos uses the Rishton stories as a starting-point to analyse child marriage, the construction of memory, and the development of local historical identity through antiquarians and the Victorian and Edwardian local press, demonstrating how - from the time of the Rishtons into the twentieth century - historical narratives were continually reshaped and repurposed.

Preface

1: 'Set all things in a perfect order'

2: 'His own father was the cause of his trouble'

3: 'God have mercy of thy soul, wife of Ralph Rishton'

4: 'In fancy and love with Ann Stanley'

5: 'I will keep him in suit'

6: 'It would be a pity not to complete the history'

Appendix: A timeline of events