Bøger i Cambridge Studies in English Legal History serien

The English common lawyers wielded their greatest influence in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In these years they were more than the only organized lay profession: in the infancy of statute, they, more than anyone, shaped and changed the law; they were the managerial elite of the country; they were the single most dynamic group in society.

Professor Bellamy traces the English law of treason to Roman and Germanic origins, and discusses the development of royal attitudes towards rebellion, the judicial procedures used to try and condemn suspected traitors, and the interaction of the law of treason and constitutional ideas.

This is a history of the law of bills and notes from medieval times to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when bills played a central role in domestic and international finances. It charts the development of legal rules and the relationship between law and economic and social controversies.

Keechang Kim makes full use of medieval and early modern sources in this reinterpretation of the legal aspects of feudalism, proposing a radical new understanding of the genesis of the modern legal regime. This innovative study will interest academics, lawyers, and students of legal history, immigration and minority issues.

This text was the first study of the bills leading to the Copyright Act 1842, during which Talfourd sought to reform copyright law. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, Seville explores the controversy provoked by the act, which led to Talfourd having to considerably modify his bill.

This 1999 book was the first full-length account of the county court, which in contemporary English life has become the main forum for most civil disputes. It began as the 'poor man's court'; but, as this book shows, it has expanded beyond its working-class origins.

In The Law of Evidence in Victorian England, which was originally published in 1997, Christopher Allen provides a fascinating account of the political, social and intellectual influences on the development of evidence law during the Victorian period.

McGlynn examines legal education at the Inns of Court in the late fifteenth/early sixteenth century. By focusing on Prerogativa Regis, she shows how the law was developed, the points of contention within and between generations, and how the general knowledge of the legal profession was utilized and refined.

Fee tails were a heritable interest in land which was both inalienable and could only pass at death by inheritance to descendants of the original grantee. Biancalana's study considers the origins of the entail, and the development of a reliable legal mechanism for their destruction, the common recovery.

The history of the family has become an area of great interest, yet the property arrangements entered into upon marriage, a crucial aspect of the process of familial wealth transmission and distribution in the landed classes in early modern England, have never been systematically studied.

Nineteenth-century governments faced considerable challenges from the rapid, novel and profound changes in social and economic conditions resulting from the industrial revolution. In the context of an increasingly sophisticated and complex government, from the 1830s the specialist and largely lay statutory tribunal was conceived and adopted as the principal method of both implementing the new regulatory legislation and resolving disputes. The tribunal's legal nature and procedures, and its place in the machinery of justice, were debated and refined throughout the Victorian period. In examining this process, this 2007 book explains the interaction between legal constraints, social and economic demand and political expediency that gave rise to this form of dispute resolution. It reveals the imagination and creativity of the legislators who drew on diverse legal institutions and values to create the new tribunals, and shows how the modern difficulties of legal classification were largely the result of the institution's nineteenth-century development.