Introduction

Summary

AIMS AND JUSTIFICATIONS

This book originated over a decade ago, during a study of the government of medieval London, in the need to understand the place of the administration of the law in that government.

What had seemed likely to be a short and straightforward investigation led to years of study and to an abiding interest in this aspect of the early history of the English common law. It soon became clear that anyone interested in either what the law of London was or how it was administered would have to look at a large number of books and articles in order to build up a detailed picture. That picture would, moreover, in a few important respects be incomplete or misleading. These problems matter because London's law courts were the most important medieval English lay law courts outside Westminster in terms of the quantity of civil litigation brought in them: in the fifteenth century, the London Sheriffs' Court may well have been second only to the central Court of the Common Bench in this respect. They served the most active and probably the most innovative of the local jurisdictions in which custom combined with the common and merchant laws to produce different legal remedies from those contemporaneously available in the central courts. The practices and procedures of the city's courts also differed in some respects from those which were most commonly employed at Westminster. Moreover, London's privileges, customs and procedures influenced those of other local courts.