Description
Book SynopsisDrawing 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 e
