Dean Rowland

(Dr Matthew Davies) M.Phil./Ph.D.
The reception and implementation of local and parliamentary legislation in England, 1422 - c.1485

Dean studied history for his first degree at Oxford in the 1980s. Since then, he has worked for a number of years as a litigation lawyer. He has recently returned to academic studies by completing an MPhil in Medieval History at Cambridge in 2006-7. His MPhil dissertation, supervised by Professor Christine Carpenter, considered the publication and reception of the legislation of the parliaments of the Yorkist period. Rather than studying parliament as an institution, or the events in parliament in this period, the focus of his dissertation was on how the government administration, members of parliament, lawyers and the localities worked to distribute, record and publicise the legislation of the period.

In his present research, supervised by Dr Matthew Davies, he is extending this study to cover much of the fifteenth century. He also intends to look at the reception of new laws considerably more broadly, taking into account the legislation promulgated in the boroughs and cities as well as that enacted in parliament, and also at how local and parliamentary legislation was implemented in local and central courts.