Travelling in Search of Civil Justice

An ambitious exploration of litigation beyond the manor, connecting everyday legal practice to wider questions of economy, governance and social change.Across medieval England, access to civil justice depended not on a single legal system but on a dense and overlapping landscape of manor, hundred, borough, ecclesiastical and royal courts. Reconstructing that world from the perspective of ordinary villagers, this study offers a major new account of how people pursued debt, covenant and trespass actions between c.1275 and c.1425. Drawing on hundreds of lawsuits and an exceptional range of manorial court rolls, plea rolls, taxation records and other archival sources, it follows litigants across jurisdictions to reveal the choices, constraints and legal knowledge required to navigate a fragmented legal order. Using Cambridgeshire as an unusually rich case study, it achieves a level of detail rarely found in studies of medieval litigation while recovering the experiences of individual plaintiffs, defendants, families and communities. At the same time, this closely researched local investigation speaks to some of the most significant debates in medieval history, legal history, economic history and the history of state formation. Challenging established assumptions about access to royal justice, the social reach of the medieval state, and the relationship between law and economic development, it offers a nuanced reinterpretation of legal culture, jurisdictional competition, serfdom, mobility and the rule of law in late medieval England. The result is a compelling account of how ordinary men and women experienced and utilised a complex legal landscape, demonstrating how a detailed regional case study can reshape broader understandings of justice, governance and society.