Books in the Cambridge Studies in English Legal History series

McGlynn examines legal education at the Inns of Court in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century. By focusing on Prerogativa Regis, she shows how the law was developed, the points of contention within and between generations, and how the general knowledge of the legal profession was utilized and refined.

This book uses a wide range of primary sources - legal, literary and demographic - to provide a radical reassessment of eighteenth-century marriage. It disproves the widespread assumption that couples married simply by exchanging consent, demonstrating that such exchanges were regarded merely as contracts to marry and that marriage in church was almost universal outside London. It shows how the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 was primarily intended to prevent clergymen operating out of London's Fleet prison from conducting marriages, and that it was successful in so doing. It also refutes the idea that the 1753 Act was harsh or strictly interpreted, illustrating the courts' pragmatic approach. Finally, it establishes that only a few non-Anglicans married according to their own rites before the Act; while afterwards most - save the exempted Quakers and Jews - similarly married in church. In short, eighteenth-century couples complied with whatever the law required for a valid marriage.

This examination of the development of contract law in England covers the period when the foundations of modern contract law were laid. It explores key themes in order to understand the drivers of legal change, including the relationship between lawyers and merchants, the role of equity, statute and legal literature.

This book, the first extended study of the legal thought of Edward Coke, investigates how law reform impacted his understanding of individual rights, royal authority, and the need for confidence in legal institutions. In doing so, it offers a new explanation for the shaping of early modern constitutional thought.

Many of the defining features of the modern law of tort can be traced to the first half of the twentieth century, but, until now, developments in that period have never received a dedicated historical examination. This book examines both common law and statutory innovations, paying special attention to underlying assumptions about the operation of society, the function of tort law, and the roles of those involved in legal changes. It recovers the legal and social contexts in which some landmark decisions were given (and which puts those decisions in a very different light) and draws attention to significant and suggestive cases that have fallen into neglect. It also explores the theoretical debates of the period about the nature of tort law, and reveals the fascinating patterns of influence and power at work behind statutory initiatives to reform the law.

This 1953 book analyses the Court of Wards and Liveries. Established on 1540 to administer the system of feudal dues, the court was additionally responsible for wardship and livery issues. Abolished in 1660, it had previously become obsolete due to the abolition of feudal tenures by the Long Parliament in 1646.

This book describes and comments on the documents by which land was transferred from one person to another in medieval England. Many different kinds of transaction are examined separately, and each type is illustrated by quotations from original deeds and discussed in connection with the law of the relevant period.

This book is primarily an account of the most familiar and longest lived of English courts.

Sir Julius Caesar was the servant of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, serving as Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, Master of Requests, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Rolls and Privy Councillor. He also sat in the later Elizabethan parliaments and all but one in James' reign.

Although the Englishmen who crossed the Irish Sea from 1169 onward brought with them their own speech and legal code, the credit for the creation of a firm basis for the alien English Law and legal institutions belongs to King John, when his accession united the Lordship of Ireland with the English Crown.

Professor Milsom works out a fresh view of the beginnings of the common law concerning land.

The six chapters of this book were commissioned in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906). In his preface, T. F. T. Plucknett observes that the theme of his lectures was 'to learn from Maitland's writings, not merely the results which he acquired but the method and inspiration of his work'.

The first history of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in England that covers the period up to the removal of principal subjects inherited from the Middle Ages. Probate, marriage and divorce, tithes, defamation, and disciplinary prosecutions involving the laity are all covered. All disappeared from the church's courts during the mid-nineteenth century, and were taken over by the royal courts. The book traces the steps and reasons - large and small - by which this occurred.

Nineteenth-century governments faced considerable challenges from the rapid, novel and profound changes in social and economic conditions resulting from the industrial revolution. In the context of an increasingly sophisticated and complex government, from the 1830s the specialist and largely lay statutory tribunal was conceived and adopted as the principal method of both implementing the new regulatory legislation and resolving disputes. The tribunal's legal nature and procedures, and its place in the machinery of justice, were debated and refined throughout the Victorian period. In examining this process, this 2007 book explains the interaction between legal constraints, social and economic demand and political expediency that gave rise to this form of dispute resolution. It reveals the imagination and creativity of the legislators who drew on diverse legal institutions and values to create the new tribunals, and shows how the modern difficulties of legal classification were largely the result of the institution's nineteenth-century development.

The history of the family has become an area of great interest, yet the property arrangements entered into upon marriage, a crucial aspect of the process of familial wealth transmission and distribution in the landed classes in early modern England, have never been systematically studied.

Fee tails were a heritable interest in land which was both inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to descendants of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins of the entail, and the development of a reliable legal mechanism for their destruction, the common recovery.

Professor Bellamy traces the English law of treason to Roman and Germanic origins, and discusses the development of royal attitudes towards rebellion, the judicial procedures used to try and condemn suspected traitors, and the interaction of the law of treason and constitutional ideas.

In The Law of Evidence in Victorian England, which was originally published in 1997, Christopher Allen provides a fascinating account of the political, social and intellectual influences on the development of evidence law during the Victorian period.

This 1999 book was the first full-length account of the county court, which in contemporary English life has become the main forum for most civil disputes. It began as the 'poor man's court'; but, as this book shows, it has expanded beyond its working-class origins.

This text was the first study of the bills leading to the Copyright Act 1842, during which Talfourd sought to reform copyright law. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, Seville explores the controversy provoked by the act, which led to Talfourd having to considerably modify his bill.

Keechang Kim makes full use of medieval and early modern sources in this reinterpretation of the legal aspects of feudalism, proposing a radical new understanding of the genesis of the modern legal regime. This innovative study will interest academics, lawyers, and students of legal history, immigration and minority issues.

This is a history of the law of bills and notes from medieval times to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when bills played a central role in domestic and international finances. It charts the development of legal rules and the relationship between law and economic and social controversies.

R. H. Helmholz, one of the world's foremost legal historians, here draws upon the evidence of the canon law, court records and the English common-law system to demonstrate the surprising extent to which Roman law survived in England after the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation.

The English common lawyers wielded their greatest influence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In these years they were more than the only organized lay profession: in the infancy of statute, they, more than anyone, shaped and changed the law; they were the managerial elite of the country; they were the single most dynamic group in society.

The court of the exchequer, which was the ancient court of tax claims, assumed an equity jurisdiction in the sixteenth century which continued until 1841. This book describes the rise, development and abolition of this part of the court.

A demonstration of the contemporary context and significance of Maine's approach to the law.

In this major study, Professor Bourguignon analyzes Sir William Scott's work as judge of the admiralty court in the light of the little-known, unpublished body of law which had been developed prior to his appointment.

This work charts the massive sixteenth-century increase in central court litigation and offers an explanation of it largely in terms of social change and the decline of local jurisdictions. At the same time, it argues that the period witnessed a major turning point in the relationship between the legal profession and English society.

This book presents a study of the evolution of a professional judiciary in medieval England through the careers of forty-nine royal justices from the last decade of Henry II until 1239. Those years were crucial for the growth of the common law, producing the two legal treatises Glanvill and Bracton.

This study presents a full account of Sheppard's employment under Cromwell's Protectorate as well as an examination of his family background and education, his religious commitment to John Owen's party of Independents and his legal philosophy.