Book Review

It has long been recognized that the fourteenth century was a period of considerable importance in the development of English law. It was a century of increasing institutionalization, both as regards Parliament as the legislature of England and as regards the royal courts, within which the common law was administered. Alongside this growth in the institutionalization of both the legislative and judicial organs of the State, there was also a significant advance in the professionalization of legal services. The judiciary became an identifiable legal caste and the practitioners who appeared before them emerged as the serjeants-at-law, from among whom the judges were to be appointed, apprentice barristers, and attorneys. The 1300s saw the final demise of the general eyres, which had played such an important role in the administration of royal justice and the development of the common law since the twelfth century, and the dispersion of its work among justices of assize, commissioners of oyer and terminer and of gaol delivery, commissioners of trailbaston and later keepers or justices of the peace. The needs of military array, the application of the statute of laborers and the standardization of weights and measures gave to judicial bodies certain administrative functions as well, and the fourteenth century also saw the appearance of the Quarter Sessions in the counties, eclipsing the role of the sheriff as a judicial officer in the shire courts. Assize judges were increasingly drawn from the ranks of the royal judges and serjeants-at-law, while the local gentry and those with some knowledge of the law in the localities found their talents put to good use on the commissions of the peace within the counties. In terms of substantive law, it was also the century that saw the steady growth of royal jurisdiction over trespass, including the expansion associated in the second half of the century with the development of the action on the case.	1
Some historians have described the fourteenth century as an age of "transformation" in the development of the common law. Musson and Ormrod take issue with the notion that the law developed in fits and starts, with sudden periods of intense activity and innovation being interspersed with "long lulls" during which the changes could be assimilated. They take issue in particular with B. H. Putnam's and Robert C. Palmer's views of such sudden "transformations" occurring during the fourteenth century, through the establishment of the justices of the peace and the expansion of common law remedies in the wake of the Black Death of 1348.	2
Musson and Ormrod incline instead to the view that while the law certainly responds of necessity to external pressures such as war, plague, and constitutional crisis--factors that they categorize as exogenous, affecting the speed of legal developments, the direction of legal development is by and large unaffected by such occurrences and is instead more the product of the inner logic of the law and of the institutions that serve it--factors they describe as endogenous. These terms they borrow from Darwinian evolutionary theory, proposing that the legal developments of the fourteenth century are better understood as evolution rather than revolution, not being attributable exclusively to either external or internal factors but rather resulting from the interplay of both.	3
Among the exogenous factors that played an important part in accelerating legal development in the fourteenth century, the authors examine the wars with Scotland and France, the impact of the Black Death, the turmoil of the Peasants' Revolt and the crises of government that afflicted the reigns of both Edward II and Richard II. While long-term warfare undoubtedly caused problems of official corruption and lawlessness at home, particularly on the frontiers and among demobilized soldiers, they challenge Putnam's thesis that the devolution of justice to the gentry in the localities was the price exacted by the commons in Parliament for voting taxation to assist the military effort. Rather, they emphasize that the new peace commissions in the localities, taken with the growth of royal justice at the center, made for a more integrated approach to the administration of justice and not a more fragmented one.	4
While their thesis is well argued and relatively clearly presented, there are some worrying features from time to time in their choice of terms. For instance, they repeatedly speak of the King's Bench hearing "appeals" from other courts and of Parliament acting as a "court of appeal," without ever clearly explaining the difference between appeals in the modern sense and jurisdiction in error. They speak of the writ of covenant being used to "enforce" written agreements, explain the grand assize as "a type of grand jury for civil actions," and surprisingly state that the "relative importance of civil litigation . . . is not mirrored in the existing literature on medieval justice." Given these oddities and that their own footnote references display a distinct emphasis upon the literature dealing with criminal rather than civil justice, the reader must feel concern that whole story has not been told.	5
The last chapter looks at various literary traditions during the fourteenth century, described as didactic, remedial, satirical, and polemical. The object of this survey is to assess whether the charges of corruption and social exclusivity leveled in those accounts are well founded on the evidence of the authors' researches. They conclude that they are not and believe that the increased levels of criticism resulted from higher standards and expectations. This concluding chapter is in many respects the most readable and interesting in the book, combining literary evidence with the legal record. Their positive conclusion, the authors argue, is personified by the relationship between Chaucer's Serjeant-at-law and Franklin.	6
While the main outline of the authors' thesis is valuable and interesting, the blurred focus of their views on more technical legal matters must leave the reader feeling uneasy with the detail of their presentation.	7
Thomas G. Watkin University of Wales, Cardiff

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