Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of figures, maps, plans and timelines
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Profiles: Three late medieval law courts
- 2 Legal space
- 3 The rituality of court practice
- 4 Legal text and social context
- 5 Court and society: The production and consumption of justice
- General conclusion
- Appendix 1 Utrecht
- Appendix 2 York
- Appendix 3 Paris
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Court and society: The production and consumption of justice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- List of figures, maps, plans and timelines
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Profiles: Three late medieval law courts
- 2 Legal space
- 3 The rituality of court practice
- 4 Legal text and social context
- 5 Court and society: The production and consumption of justice
- General conclusion
- Appendix 1 Utrecht
- Appendix 2 York
- Appendix 3 Paris
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Late medieval law courts were neither all-powerful legal authorities nor impersonal fora for legal messaging. As complex institutions, consisting of individual functionaries with their proper interests and involvements, yet sporting an explicitly corporate identity, they sought socio-legal legitimacy by offering potential litigants and audiences a specific model of justice. To do so, they navigated a number of partially overlapping socio-legal communicative fields, each with their own participants and media. While, on the one hand, trying to define and demarcate these fields themselves, courts also engaged in them to present elaborate narratives on the nature of society and their own position therein. As such, they balanced their inherent involvement in society with the suggestion of their transcendence thereof.
Keywords: medieval law courts, medieval lawyers, legal communication, legal speech, legal narrative, field theory
Until now, the focus of this book has been on the media – be they of a spatial, enacted, oral or textual nature – constituting the process of court communication. We have seen how law courts formed the locus of an extensive communicative activity, where diverse social issues were negotiated between its participants. The latter, while present in each of the previous chapters, have not stood at the centre of attention as such. Yet it was participants’ intentions and their subsequent activities that drove much of these processes of socio-legal communication. In recent years, the users of law courts have received greater attention from social and legal historians. Daniel Lord Smail, for one, has proposed to approach developments in legal practice from a consumerist perspective. While courts were traditionally considered the exclusive result of rulers’ attempts at acquiring socio-political monopolies of power, Smail emphasized the role of the law's consumers, that is, those pursuing their cases in court, in shaping the court-based legal system of many late medieval societies. It was at least partly because litigants actively chose to invest in a legal process that courts could become such dominant forms of legal practice. Thus, the agents of change in this period were not just authorities coercing society into using their courts, but rather the people themselves who considered it profitable to bring their disputes there, instead of looking for an alternative solution.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Scripting Justice in Late Medieval EuropeLegal Practice and Communication in the Law Courts of Utrecht, York and Paris, pp. 203 - 246Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022