Commonplace Knowledge of Law and Litigation in Early Modern England
The pace of early modern England’s litigation boom begs the question: how did those non-elite people who made up the mass of clients to the judicial system know when, where, and how to go to law? Many would have relied on trained professionals – but they did not have the total monopoly on legal literacies, which existed beyond formal encounters, spaces, and records of the law, too. One understudied source for broader legal literacy is the manuscript commonplace book (or miscellany), kept and compiled by literate people of rural and urban communities. Historians have studied these miscellanies with an eye to their domestic and literary contents. Much less attention has been paid to the more mundane materials they contain: namely, legal documents. This paper will present findings from a survey of commonplace books from the period c.1450 to c.1600. It places their legal materials into three rough categories: poetic reflections on law and its utility; compilers’ own legal paperwork and memoranda; and, most intriguingly, template legal documents designed to be re-used by the writer or others in their network, usually kept in formularies. It will explore how knowledge about legal procedures was preserved and circulated through these archival processes, contributing to widening legalism.
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This page was last updated on 30 June 2024