The history of crime in late medieval and early modern England: A review of the field∗

Over the last decade or so the history of crime, law and order, and attitudes to such matters, has emerged as a subject of central importance to social historians. An increasing number of scholars in Europe, North America and Australia are working on the history of crime, covering every period from the Dark Ages to the twentieth century. Their labours, despite unusually difficult problems of methodology, source criticism and definition, are beginning to bear fruit in the form of an ever-growing body of publications.' The contribution of historians working on English materials has been especially significant for the late medieval and early modern eras. The historian of crime in England perhaps is working under particularly severe difficulties. In many instances he must use familiar materials to solve unfamiliar problems, or to formulate familiar ones more precisely; in so doing, he becomes vulnerable to the criticism, constructive and otherwise, of the practitioners of such entrenched disciplines as legal history,2 or the older style of economic history. He is also, given the relative novelty of the serious and