This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law’ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Laura Flannigan is a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford University. She works on litigation, society, and politics in late medieval and early modern England. You can follow her on Twitter/X at @LFlannigan17.

Laura Flannigan

Historians often take for granted that the high usage of England’s early modern law courts denotes a widespread ‘law-mindedness’ in that period. Certainly by c.1600 English society was litigious on a scale unprecedented at the time and unrivalled since. But litigating was a complex business. It required an ample personal archive of evidence on which to base a case, and the know-how to appeal to the appropriate court with the correct documentation at the right time. Where few today would automatically know how to go about commencing a lawsuit, our pre-modern forebears were more likely to be legally literate. What did they know about law and its procedures in the midst of the early modern ‘legal revolution’, and how did they know it?

I’ve recently spent time tracing the circulation of legal knowledge through one type of source material: manuscript ‘commonplace’ books. By this I mean not the systematised collections of reading notes curated by learned gentlemen or the alphabetically ordered definitions accumulated by law students, both following humanist traditions of commonplacing. Rather, my focus has been the scrappier, personal notebooks of estate administrators, rural gentry, and urban merchants. These contain everything from astrological diagrams, popular literature, and religious treatises to more personal financial reckonings, instructions for hawking and hunting, medical remedies, and household recipes. At the time of writing this piece I’ve studied twenty such books from the period c.1400 to c.1600, originating from all corners of England – from Hampshire to Northumberland, Norfolk to Somerset.[1]

Their contents validate Christopher Brooks’s sentiment that law ‘provided one of the principal discourses through which early-modern English people conceptualised the world in which they lived’.[2] Several of these manuscripts include among their lists of aphorisms certain pithy observations on judicial processes, like ‘better is a friend in court than a penny in the purse’. Four notebooks from the early sixteenth century contain the same doggerel verse providing advice for those ‘who so will be wise in purchasing’ lands: recommending that they check the ‘seller be of age’ and ‘make thy charter of warrantise to thyn heires & assigneys’. Elsewhere in their notebooks these compilers – themselves often landowners and administrators – copied their own deeds and wrote memoranda about their own lawsuits. Legal information was as useful to have to hand as the financial accounts and domestic recipes recorded on other pages of the same books.

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Zoë Jackson (Twitter: @ZoeMJackson1, Bluesky: @zoejackson.bsky.social) is a PhD student at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, researching the relationship between memory and perjury in later seventeenth-century England.

Zoë Jackson

From personal experience ‘perjury’ (intentionally lying under oath in a legal setting) is not a widely understood term amongst most people today. Whenever I explain my research, I usually have to define what perjury is (and sometimes must clarify that I’m not specifically concerned with other, similar sounding terms – ‘purgatory’, anyone?) Calling someone a ‘perjurer’ today would probably get you, at most, a quizzical look.

But in early modern England, as Mary Basnett was made fully aware, calling someone a ‘perjurer’ was grounds for a defamation suit. In November 1673, the Consistory Court of Chester ordered Mary Basnett to perform penance in the parish church of Frodsham, by reciting before the congregation the following words: ‘Whereas I Mary Basnett have wronged Alice Gee in rashly saying, If shee hath taken such an oath shee is forsworne, I am heartily sorry for the same, for I know no such crime of her, and I desyre her to forgive mee’. In the court case that preceded this judgment, multiple witnesses testified to hearing Mary Basnett accusing Alice Gee of taking a false oath in a previous trial.[1]

Legal disputes like this one between Mary Basnett and Alice Gee are of interest to me for what they reveal about local understandings of perjury (as opposed to the formal definitions you find in legal treatises and dictionaries). Perjury was a crime in early modern England, but it was also a sin, breaching both the Third Commandment (against taking God’s name in vain) and the Ninth Commandment (against bearing false witness). In church court defamation cases, witnesses described whether or not accusations of perjury were made, and what damage this did to the alleged perjurer’s reputation. As historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and others have established, although these records do not represent the direct words of the people, they can still be useful in illuminating contemporary attitudes and practices, such as in this case around the functioning of community.

Mark Hailwood

England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a remarkably – and increasingly – litigious society. Whether through a growing drive to prosecute crimes and enforce laws, or a greater willingness to take neighbours to court, early modern men and women across the social scale routinely found themselves in the legal arena as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses. This level of popular engagement with the law was arguably at a higher point in the years between 1560 and 1640 than at any other time in English history.  

This is great news for historians of this period, and especially for the practitioners of ‘history from below’; whilst the common people, who were likely to be illiterate, leave us few written sources penned by their own hands, their actions – and sometimes their attitudes – did leave an imprint in the legal sources recorded and retained by the many courts of early modern England. Since the 1970s, then – when social history began to take off in UK university History Departments – researchers have often turned to court records in their attempts to uncover the history of early modern non-elite actors.

The first wave of work on legal sources often focused, quite understandably, on what these records could tell us about patterns of crime and criminality, not infrequently using a quantitative approach to make sense of the changing nature of court business. From the 1990s, under the influence of the ‘cultural turn’, the emphasis shifted from counting crimes to offering close qualitative readings of legal sources, especially the detailed statements – or depositions – given by those called before the courts, for what they could reveal about the gender dynamics, or social conflicts, at the heart of certain types of case. More recent work has often adopted an ‘incidentalist’ approach, using these depositions to examine everyday activities that were mentioned in passing, rather than being the subject of a case, thereby reconstructing patterns of work and sociability, or the experiences of particular groups in this society, such as female servants.