The Law School and the Centre for Law and History Research hosted the 26^th British Legal History Conference from 3^rd to 6^th July 2024. The conference organisers were Gwen Seabourne and Joanna McCunn. Read on to see some of their reflections on the experience.

GS: Now that we have had a bit of time to recover, and the dust has settled, it seems like a good chance to think about our time preparing for, and hosting, the BLHC. I came away feeling happy about it all, and glad that we did it. What about you?

JM: I’m really glad we did it too! There was definitely a lot of work involved behind the scenes – not just by us but by lots of our colleagues too. But it felt like it all paid off as soon as the conference delegates arrived and started enjoying the events we had planned for them. I was especially glad that we were able to show off some Bristolian highlights, even if the weather didn’t always co-operate…

GS: It felt to me like a good time to do this, both in personal terms, and also in terms of where legal history is as a discipline at the moment.

The personal aspect is that putting this thing on is an absolutely massive task. Fellow medieval legal historians (a really huge demographic …) will know what I mean when I say that hosting the BLHC is a little bit like having the general eyre visit your town (only without the hangings). The size of the undertaking means that, at earlier points in my career, when I ran the legal history unit at Bristol single-handed, and there were nothing like as many legal historians and legal history-friendly academics in the Law School as we now have, it would have been far too much to take on. Now, though, we are in a much stronger position, with several colleagues working in the area, our own research centre, and even a legal historian as Head of School. And, of course, it was great to do this with you. Thank goodness we get on well, trust each other’s instincts and were generally ‘on the same page’ in terms of what we wanted to do with the conference. Imagine if we’d had ‘artistic differences’ …!

JM: Haha, yes, I’m very glad that neither of us turned out to be a conference diva! And that we were able to keep a sense of humour about it all.

GS: The bigger picture, for me at least, was that legal history is in an interesting place generally. It is something that attracts scholars from a number of different academic backgrounds, and, although its ‘centre of gravity’ remains in law schools, it does feel as if it is opening up to, and welcoming the perspectives of, social and economic historians, literary scholars and others. I have always been keen on pushing the inter-disciplinary aspect of legal history, and this was a great chance to do that.

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In 1241, a woman of royal descent died in Bristol castle. She was Eleanor of Brittany, granddaughter of one king of England (Henry II), niece of two more (Richard ‘the Lionheart’ and ‘Bad’ King John), and first cousin of the man on the throne at that point (Henry III), not to mention daughter of a duke and duchess of Brittany. She had spent a lot of her last two decades in Bristol, a city on the rise, with an imposing castle, but Eleanor’s prolonged stay here was very much not her own choice.

 

She had been born between 1182 and 1184, and, with her pedigree, would have expected a big dynastic marriage, life at one of the great courts of Europe, a position of respect as wife and mother, frequent travel, extensive lands, and a life of some influence. None of this happened: she ended up a prisoner of the kings of England for much of her life, a situation which only ended with her death in captivity in Bristol.

 

Eleanor had not, as far as we know, committed any offence which might justify this unusual treatment, however: she was confined not for what she had done, but for who she was. After the death of her uncle Richard, it might have been argued that the right to the throne of John, and his line, was weaker than that of the children of his older brother, Eleanor’s dead father, Geoffrey. It was in the interests of John and his son Henry III to keep her unmarried and under control, and that is what they did.

 

Eleanor’s story may strike us as sad, or cruel. Or we may not be moved by her difficulties and disappointments, when we compare them to the sharper suffering of many of her contemporaries: she did, after all, have food to eat and clothes to wear, the occasional royal gift, and lived out a fairly long life. Whatever may be our emotional response, I think that Eleanor’s treatment tells us some important things about women, law and legal history.

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(This post appeared on the University of Bristol Law School Blog in February 2024)

 

The common law of England, in the medieval centuries and long afterwards, was man-made law: created by and in the interests of free men, drawing on and reinforcing ideas of women as inferior. Its assumption of the superiority of men was intensified during marriage, with the wife’s identity defined in relation to her husband, her legal personality subordinated to his in important respects. Studying the documentation left behind by those making, administering and using the common law in medieval England provides ample confirmation of the disadvantages and limitations which were imposed upon women and the hierarchical nature of marriage. Amongst the many records which seem to show settled, hierarchical ideas, there are, however, occasional glimpses of subtler thinking and richer detail, serving both to nuance our view of medieval thinking about law and gender, and also to expand our understanding of the lives of medieval women, up to a point. Such glimpses can be found in the documentation relating to an episode in the later fifteenth century, and subsequent legal action, which I will note here.[i]

A northern English landowner, Sir John Assheton, alleged that, on a November night in 1470, a group of more than 200 ‘riottours’, headed by a certain John Myrfeld and Richard Ledys, attacked his manor of Howley (Morley, Yorkshire). They were, he said, brandishing a fearsome array of weapons, and they came with trumpets and horns blaring, damaging his property pulling walls down and deliberately setting fires, and causing considerable fear to his household, including his wife, her female companions and his servants. He himself had been taken away to nearby Pontefract Castle, and made to seal a bond for £1000 in their favour, obliging him to do what they wanted. He petitioned for the aid of king (Edward IV) and parliament, to ensure that he was able to take effective legal action against multiple miscreants.

So far, so stereotypically masculine: men and property; men and violence; men and their weapons; an exclusively male parliament and legal profession; a male monarch, a wife whose name is not thought worth noting. There are, however, valuable references to women, and hints about gender ideas, in the petition in which Assheton told this story, and in the wider body of documentation on the case.

In the petition, Assheton suggested that the attack was particularly serious because of its effect on his wife and the women attending her. His anonymous spouse had, he said, just had a baby, and was still ‘in child-bed’. She was very frightened by the attack, then and for a long time afterwards. Assheton did eventually say that he experienced ‘fere’ but only after he had attributed even stronger emotions to his ‘wif’, describing her as being ‘in right grete dispare of hir lif’, and noting that the ‘gentilwomen’ who were with his wife, shared her feelings.

In addition to the emotional impact on his wife, he also stressed the danger which would have been involved in moving her away from the scene of the attack: at that point just after her delivery: moving her would be a risk to her life (putting her in ‘ieop[ar]dy of hir deth’). The possibility of death in or after childbirth was much on the minds of medieval people, and the petition also alludes to one of the ways in which they might choose to improve the chances of a good outcome. Describing the situation of his wife, Assheton’s petition mentions that she was, at the time of the attack, lying ‘in the bandes (or, in one instance, ‘bondes’) of ‘Our Lady’. This important, and rather intimate, detail, referring to the Virgin Mary and the possibility of her assistance in childbirth, might conceivably be metaphorical, but I think that it is rather more concrete than that, and indicates the use of a particular supernaturally-charged device: the birth girdle. Such belts, or girdles, inscribed with prayers for the safety of the wearer, and sometimes invoking the aid of Mary, have aroused the interest of historians of medicine, religion and gender for some time, and a recent scientific study of one surviving girdle gave strong evidence of the fact that it was actually wrapped around the body of the woman during childbirth.[ii] This documentary evidence may extend understanding of the use of such objects a little, suggesting as it does that a woman might remain girdled for a time after the delivery, and also that the use of the girdle was sufficiently well-known to laymen to make it a useful ‘plot element’ in a non-specialist medical or religious narrative.

The other detail of the petition’s birth story which is worth emphasising is the surrounding of the labouring and newly-delivered wife by other women, confirming the idea of confinement as a period in which one would expect female-only company (unless there was some emergency).[iii] While male medical professionals were increasingly claiming gynaecology as part of their intellectual domain,[iv] this account reinforces the idea of childbirth usually being a women-only event.

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If it has escaped anyone’s attention, the Bristol legal historians are gearing up to host the British Legal History Conference 2024 (3^rd-6^th July 2024, since you ask, and yes, booking is now open … ‘early bird’ rate available until 31st March …). It has been a long time since the BLHC came to these parts: the last time Bristol was the venue was July 1981.

Recidivist BLHC attendee and Welsh Legal History Society luminary, Richard Ireland, has kindly passed on the programme from that last Bristol BLHC, and a very interesting document it is too. So, what were the legal historians of 1981 up to, in that time of Mrs Thatcher in 10 Downing Street, the Specials topping the charts with ‘Ghost Town’ (so the internet informs me), and many people feverishly buying up Charles and Diana tea-towels …?

The cover shows us that the fifth BLHC was a joint effort between the Department of History and the (late) Faculty of Law. That, perhaps, brings up some interesting thoughts about the relationship between the two main disciplinary bases for legal historians, which we might well reflect upon when we meet in July. The imperfect appearance of the text, typewritten and photocopied, may mist the eyes of some who remember the pre-computerised world. (Those marks on the left hand side are staples, future legal historians and BLHC attendees of many years hence – a primitive method of attaching together hard copies of information, on the now-obsolete medium known as ‘paper’. Yes, the past is a very foreign country.)

 

 

 

 

The first page gives us a little history of the conference, and the names of the Continuation Committee (conference ‘regulars’ may recognise one or two familiar names here) and the Bristol convenors of the time.  The gender balance in the committee and the use of ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’ for female academics may be noted.

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New law students often experience academic culture shock. As Russell Sandberg writes, ‘Law Schools are strange places’, where students are expected to solve unusual problems, use a unique set of sources, and employ distinctive methods. They are asked to ‘think like lawyers’, even when these new ways of thinking are ‘at odds with what law students have previously experienced’. Happily, help is close at hand: there is no shortage of books written by distinguished lawyers who are anxious to explain to new law students what the law is and how they should approach its study.

Law students’ culture shock is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, and nor is experienced lawyers’ instinct to offer well-meaning advice. Early modern law students had plenty of complaints as they began their studies at the Inns of Court. They were not offered official reading lists or introductory courses: instead, they were expected to read their way through the case law by themselves. Many students were shocked by the heavy workload and lack of clear direction. Henry Spelman described his work as ’a mass which was not only large, but which was to be continually borne on the shoulders’, while Abraham Fraunce complained that ‘the study of the Law’ was ‘hard, harsh, unpleasant, unsavory, rude and barbarous’.

Lawyers soon began to publish books of advice to help these struggling law students. Some instructed students on how they should spend their time. In 1663, for example, Edward Waterhouse recommended the following (rather varied) timetable to law students: 5-6am was for reading the Bible and praying; 6-9am was for reading law; 9-11am for fencing and dancing; 11am-12 noon for learning logic and rhetoric; 12-2pm for eating; 2-5pm for visiting friends; 5-6pm for reading poetry; 6-8pm for eating again; and 8-9pm for praying before bed.

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I’m currently writing about a work called Epieikeia: A Dialogue on Equity in Three Parts, which was composed by Edward Hake in the late sixteenth century. Hake was a Puritan, a poet, and a local government official, who hoped that his treatise would bring him to the King’s attention and secure his advancement. If I’m honest, I first became interested in this work because it’s more than a little bizarre.

For a start, it’s written in dialogue form—as an imaginary conversation between Hake and two friends, Lovelace and Eliott. The conceit is that the three men have gathered before dinner when Eliott starts pressing Hake to explain to them the nature of equity (as you do). Hake is initially reluctant, but is soon convinced to spend three afternoons (or 140 pages) expounding his ideas.

The literary dialogue was popular in Renaissance Europe, and many writers used it to draw out a range of views and ambiguities around their topic. Hake… did not. Lovelace and Eliott are really only there to repeat his conclusions and tell him how clever he is. (Sample contribution from Eliott: ‘I acknowledge to have received both pleasure and profitt [from Hake’s discussion], pleasure in the variety of the matter, and profitt in the good end and purpose that hath byn of it. And this I must confesse, that had it not byn for this and your former speache, I sholde have remained in error…’) It’s a shame that this mode of writing has fallen out of fashion—it must be good for the self-esteem and a helpful cure for writer’s block.

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