This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English – and now Welsh – legal sources. Angela Muir is Lecturer in Social and Cultural History and Director of the Centre for Regional and Local History at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on gender, sex, crime, deviance and the body in Wales and England in the long eighteenth century. You can find her on X @DrAngelaMuir and Bluesky @drangelamuir.bsky.social.

Angela Muir

When we think about religious diversity in Georgian Wales, what typically comes to mind is the growth of Protestant Nonconformity. What we don’t typically think about is Judaism. However, Wales was home to a small but important Jewish community from the middle of the eighteenth-century, which was based primarily in the South Wales port of Swansea.

We know much about the Jewish community in Wales in the nineteenth century due to a richer and more varied range of records available, and to the work of historians like Harold Pollins, Ursula R. Q. Henriques and Cai Parry-Jones.[1] Little research has focused on the lives and experiences of the individuals who made up the earlier community. However, through my research using the records of the Court of Great Sessions in Wales, I have serendipitously come across additional evidence which helps add more depth and detail to our understanding of the lives and experiences of some Jews in Georgian Wales.

The Great Sessions were the highest court in Wales between the 1540s and 1830 when they were abolished and replaced with the Assize system. Overseeing both civil and serious criminal cases, the Great Sessions administered English law in Wales. Surviving records from the Great Sessions, which are held at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, provide uniquely detailed evidence not only about crime and deviance, but also about Welsh society and culture that historians can uncover by reading these records ‘against the grain’. It is in these records that we find evidence about Wales’s early Jewish community.

Tradition has it that Jews began to settle in Swansea in the early eighteenth century. The earliest individuals who we definitively know about include David Michael, who became a leader of the local Jewish community. Michael is believed to have arrived in Swansea along with a handful of other Jewish men in 1740s, likely as refugees from Germany

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Charmian Mansell is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She works on early modern gender and work, and mobility and migration, and has articles in Continuity and Change, Gender & History and The Historical Journal. She is the author of Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024). You can follow her on Twitter/X at @charmianmansell.

Charmian Mansell

In 1609, Norfolk-born Thomas Hanwood was questioned by officials over his trade as a petty chapman. His work took him across the country and most recently, had brought him into Somerset. Perhaps on the highway as he peddled his wares, he passed the servants of Joanna King. Five times a week they rode six miles to Bristol, returning to the Somerset village of Compton Dando upon horses laden with wheat to be ground at their mistress’s mill.[1]

Tracking everyday movements of much of today’s society has become pervasive. Google Maps tells me the places I’ve visited over the years and reminds me how often I walk to my favourite café. Uber collects data on all the times it’s been too late (or I’ve been too lazy) to walk home from the train station. Alongside digital tracking, transport-use surveys and interviews of migrant people provide yet more data for the systematic and detailed study of contemporary mobility.[2]

But it’s rare to unearth detailed records of the daily movements of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century person or community. Letters, journals, travelogues, and diaries document the travels of literate people, allowing us to trace the journeys and geographically expansive networks made by elites and middling sorts. Tracing the dynamic footsteps of urban dwellers as they criss-crossed cityscapes has become possible through records of civic government. We know, then, that dispersed personal networks created economies and communities. But what about the mobile lives of non-elites and rural dwellers? After all, they made up the majority of people in pre-modern societies.[3] To shadow their movements, we have to look elsewhere.

Over the last decade and more, legal records have become the bread-and-butter of my academic work. Searching for experiences of service in court depositions for my PhD (and later, book) was needle-in-a-haystack work: weeks (or maybe months?) of combing through church court witness statements uncovered around 30,000 witnesses, only around 500 of whom were female servants (less than 2 per cent). But this time round as I bury myself in the same documents for a new project ‘Everyday Mobility in Early Modern England’, I find people on the move everywhere.

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Lucy Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Alabama. You can follow Lucy on X/Twitter @drlucykaufman.

Lucy Kaufman

Thomas Kendall was despondent. “I am richer in years and in diseases than in any other riches,” he wrote to Thomas Windebank in 1574, in a thinly-veiled plea for patronage and employment. “I have in boarding and teaching gentlemen’s children and others been mine own decay, and now at midsummer I give it all over…I remain yet in the house of one John Paston whom I think you know, but no longer than midsummer next. I paid my rent truly for the year £5, but what moved him to warn me out, I know not. Our City is sore peopled with strangers but we almost know not where to place us.”[1]

It was a last-minute scribble at the bottom of the letter: strategic, a little self-pitying, and tinged with a nativist anxiety that sounds not terribly dissimilar to that you hear in political debates today. But it also reflected a particular view of a new reality: the soaring number of immigrants from the Low Countries—known as ‘Strangers’—in Norwich in the 1560s and 70s. In 1565, the city welcomed in 300 immigrants. By 1571, there were over 4,000 such immigrants in Norwich, men, women, and over 1600 children.[2] To put this in perspective, in 1565, Strangers accounted for no more than one percent of the population of Norwich, England’s second-largest city, next only to London in both size and wealth. Less than a decade later, one in three inhabitants was an immigrant.

They were driven to England by religious war. After the violent wave of Calvinist iconoclasm known as the Beeldenstorm destroyed images in the Low Countries, Spain set up a tribunal to prosecute heresy—one that would see nearly 10,000 put on trial. In response, Protestants began to flee from the Low Countries; some historians estimate more than 60,000 emigrating between 1567 and 1568 alone. Many of those, particularly from the areas of Zeeland and Flanders, followed the old woolen trade routes to England.[3] There, they settled in London, Canterbury, Sandwich, Colchester—and in Norwich.

My work on this is part of a project I’m just beginning, examining what I think is the first wave of what we, in modern words, might call ideological immigration into England. It was a movement sparked by geopolitical conflicts that sprung from the fractures of the Reformation, where populations were being imprisoned, attacked, and executed for their religious beliefs. What resulted in England, however, was something far different than expectations: new experiments in managing populations, new definitions of belonging, new capacities of state power.

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.