Traditionally the impetus for legislation came from the sovereign. The law-codes attributed to Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman kings exemplified the monarch’s apparent lead in promulgating laws for the good of his subjects. Royal confirmation of the laws of the realm (especially the laws of St Edward the Confessor) was expected of a monarch at his coronation. The experience during the thirteenth century of calling extraordinary assemblies of representatives to discuss the affairs of the realm and approve royal edicts was reflected in Edward II’s coronation oath (1308), which included an obligation on the king to uphold ‘the laws and rightful customs which the community of your realm shall have chosen’. The consensual element to royal legislation developed further during the fourteenth century with the frequent summoning of parliaments and general recognition that this was where adjustments to the law of the land should be deliberated and enunciated. The commons’ request for remedy of specific matters deemed to be for the welfare to the realm in return for their assent to taxation became an established part of parliamentary procedure. The common petitions in which the knights and burgesses attending parliament articulated their demands were frequently used as a basis for legislation. By Richard II’s reign it could be declared that ‘the law of the land was made in parliament by the king and the lords spiritual and temporal and all the commons of the kingdom’. As Bishop Alcock expressed in his sermon at the opening of parliament in 1485, it was a cooperative enterprise uniting the sovereign and his people in pursuit of ‘good governance’.

The beginning of Macbeth’s soliloquy in Act 2, scene 1 is one of the most recognisable passages in the canon. ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee’ (Mac. 2.1.33–34). The words may be familiar but they still have some secrets.

Royal legislation issued in English between the baptism of Æthelberht of Kent (c. 600 ad) and the reign of Cnut (r. 1016–35) comprises one of Europe’s more remarkable records of early political and legal thought. In it we see the transformation of England from a collection of disputing kingdoms to a nation united under the rule of Wessex in resistance to Viking incursions – all before one such Viking, Cnut (or ‘Canute the Great’), overcame Æthelred II (‘Ethelred the Unready’) and then made full use of the laws maintained by Æthelred and his ancestors, thereby easing the shock of alien rule. No polity of early Western Europe (save Ireland) left such a lengthy record of its reflections on matters of law in its own language. As we will see, this corpus encompasses a range of prose genres beyond those issuing from the royal court; most were read and copied long after the Norman Conquest.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, does it. Likewise, Peter Quince, carpenter of Athens. They write for actors. And writing for actors, they tell us something about how the playwright who’s written them writes for actors.

Attempts to define treason often imply a debate about the very nature and limits of the law, and about the legal authority of governments. Medieval literature reflects such tensions, but also seems to invest imaginatively in the concept of treason to an extent that the history of law alone cannot explain. In this chapter it is argued that treason took on a new shape during the period from the 1260s to the 1340s, and that this was to have a lasting effect on its representation, not just in English law, but also in English culture more generally. This evolution was significantly conditioned by the political turmoils of the period, including the Second Barons’ War of 1264–7, Edward I’s campaigns in Wales and Scotland, Edward II’s conflict with Thomas of Lancaster, and Edward II’s eventual deposition in 1327. Literary texts testify to the legal paradigm-shifts provoked by these events, and to the differences of political principle that underlay them; but they themselves seem to have played a part in the very processes that led to the creation of these new paradigms. What we see in several late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century texts is something of the cultural and political ferment in which new attitudes to treason were formed.

The extent of Chaucer’s direct involvement with legal practice has been an open question since the fifteenth century. Although a practical knowledge of both the law and legal procedure was expected of London’s citizens, details from Chaucer’s life-records and his ease with legal terminology and protocol would seem to associate him closely with the courts, though in ways broader and less reliant on institutional credentialing than experienced by the many legal professionals he encountered in his dealings. Beyond Thomas Speght’s observation in the biographical note prefacing his 1598 Workes of Chaucer that ‘It seemeth that [Chaucer was] of the inner Temple’ (a note based on an already-lost document noted by Speght’s contemporary, William Buckley), we have no evidence substantiating Chaucer’s connection to formal legal studies. Instead, we can understand his legal knowledge through a mass of extant records, now assembled in the Chaucer Life-Records, consisting ‘largely of legal documents: records of expenses, exchequer writs, payments of annuities, appointments to office, witness statements, pleas of debt, house leases’. Rather than record his career, they witness his multiple and lifelong transactions within England’s legal systems. In fact, because we have no record of Chaucer’s life as a poet, these legal documents provide the primary window into his biography.

How does Shakespeare speak of style? Among his twenty thousand or so words, ‘style’ is not especially prominent, occurring fewer than twenty times. The range of those few uses, however, is wide enough to show the complexity of the concept, and to suggest how vital it is for his work even when it goes unnamed.

The common culture of medieval Europe was derived from two main sources: the shared inheritance of the Roman classical past and the international character of the Western Church. Law was a major element in both these forces shaping European culture. This included civil law, the law of the ancient Roman Empire. It survived the Empire’s political collapse in the West through its codification in the Empire’s remaining eastern half under Emperor Justinian in the early sixth century. Only parts of this codification were known in the early medieval West, but it was rediscovered there in its entirety by the twelfth century. It became a subject of study in the emerging universities of medieval Europe, and this stimulated its growing international influence. It was an increasingly important source of ideas and rules for other medieval legal systems, notably canon law, the law of the Western Church. Canon law also had a long tradition going back to late antiquity, and the twelfth century was likewise decisive to its international reach and impact. No single collection of canon law enjoyed universal recognition comparable to Justinian’s codification till the appearance of Gratian’s Decretum in c. 1140. This canonical collection was rapidly adopted as the standard textbook for teaching canon law, which emerged as a subject of study alongside civil law in Western universities from the mid-twelfth century. Canon and civil law would remain the only law studied in medieval universities, but their pan-European significance was not limited to the classroom. From the twelfth century the Western Church developed an international system of courts to settle disputes and prosecute crimes under its jurisdiction in accordance with canon law. Civil law also influenced legal practice in these courts since from the late twelfth century it provided the basis for the so-called ‘Romano-canonical’ procedure followed in them. Canon and civil law thus touched people’s lives across later medieval Europe, not least since church courts exercised jurisdiction over major aspects of daily life, notably marriage.

English law was influenced by many legal traditions: Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Frankish and Norman law and custom; feudal and seignorial law; borough customs, mercantile law and guild regulations; and Roman and canon law taught at English and continental universities. Common law became a recognisable legal system in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the expansion of royal justice created a need for unofficial treatises, tracts and compilations in Latin and Anglo-Norman (Law French). These legal texts served a diverse readership of judges, lawyers, religious houses, prelates, landowners, manorial stewards, urban corporations, merchants and others needing legal knowledge. Commercial book production in Greater London and beyond resulted in a proliferation of legal manuscripts, from plain scribal copies for working lawyers to deluxe illuminated copies for high-status patrons. Supplementing these were manuscripts copied for their own use by lawyers, clerks and law students, especially after the rise of the Inns of Court from the 1340s. Scribal transmission of individually executed copies, usually written on parchment in varying grades of Anglicana script (an English book cursive of documentary origin) gave way from the 1480s to lawbook printing and publishing on paper.

Critics and scholars specialise in analysing poetic experience. But writers and readers are human animals, and there must be a framework that can apprehend both poetic experience and daily experience, a scaffolding for thought, language, and experience that is used one way to structure our experiences of life, and another for our experiences of poetry.

The proliferation of political complaints, satire and ‘advice’ in poetry and prose surviving from the twelfth century on suggests that medieval England’s steeply hierarchical world was pervaded by political debate and satire, in both of which law, in its tangled conceptual and institutional forms, was a central focus. This is partly because law was crucial to the two most important centres of medieval authority, by which everyone’s lives were in some measure guided: the king and the church. From the Conquest on, those were separate centres of increasingly massive written and unwritten bodies of law, courts and legions of legal professionals, whose numbers grew from the thirteenth century especially. Their proliferation, reliance on payment, and power over those seeking justice but lacking powerful connections or wealth provided fodder for much satire and complaint. Behind institutional systems, some of the fundamental ideas of political authority were paradoxical and continually subject to debate, chief among which was the kind of authority held by the king, clashing with that held by other potentates or wider political representatives, in parliament and elsewhere.

Such writing, whether in Latin, French or – increasingly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – English, often claims to present the voices of ‘common’ subjects of the law, although how truly representative such writing was is ultimately unanswerable. The fiction of constructing politically representative voices in writing, however, has a history and political importance of its own. Thus as well as discussing how the law figures in political writing and political clashes, this chapter will also consider the changing nature of the idea of being a subject of the law, as displayed through the narrators and implied readers of political literature.