Late medieval towns were bustling spaces, circumscribed by rules and awash with ideas of good governance, proper hierarchy, and market integrity.In The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England, Esther Liberman Cuenca studies the townspeople and their ideas as expressed in hundreds of borough customs and charters from England, Scotland, and Ireland between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.Drawing upon careful qualitative and quantitative analysis of custumals, incorporation charters, compilations, oaths, and ordinances, Cuenca carefully teases out what the body of customary law meant for those living within urban spaces.She argues that, taken together, these documents reveal a worldview of the urban elite alongside the social realities of the spaces in which that elite lived and worked.Cuenca designs her study to showcase ideals expressed about governance (in the first three chapters) and the lived experience of that governance (in the last three chapters).After an explanation of the origins of customary law in England, most often derived from initial charters that detailed town formation and that established certain privileges, Cuenca trains her focus on the allimportant role of the town clerk in the establishment and preservation of custom.In charters, custumals, and compilations these individuals preserved details that were relevant to the officials about tolls, property, trade and guild regulations, and the parameters and responsibilities of the borough court.Common clerks, who could be authors, scribes, compilers, and/or commentators (55), were "instrumental in the codification of urban customary law" (56) and were expected to provide advice and follow discretion in their tasks.As "information experts" (69), clerks were a critical link in establishing and preserving the legitimacy of urban governance, a process Cuenca details in chapter three.This legitimacy was derived most often from past legal
Kate Kelsey Staples (Fri,) studied this question.