The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England

Author: Esther Liberman Cuenca
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198916772
Published In: April 2025
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

List Price: HKD 1,287.00

HKD 1,248.39 Save HKD 38.61 (3%)

Download Order Form

Add to Wishlist
| Add to Compare

Description
Contents

Details

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.

Introduction

1:The Making of Urban Charters and Custumals

2:The Authorship and Transmission of Urban Custumals

3:Customary Time and Urban Memory

4:Custom, Community, and the Common Good

5:Unenfranchisement: The Gendered and Classed Boundaries of Custom

6:Oath-Taking and the Performance of Urban Customary Law

Coda