Law and Society in Later Medieval England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of Paul Brand, ed. Travis R. Baker

It is extremely unusual in the English-speaking world for a scholar to receive a second Festschrift. That Paul Brand has received this honour reflects not only the extent of his scholarship and knowledge but also, as the editor of the present volume (Travis R. Baker) points out, ‘his willingness to share that knowledge with other scholars’ (p. xii). It is interesting to compare this second Festschrift with the first (Laws, Lawyers and Texts: Studies in Medieval Legal History in Honour of Paul Brand, ed. Susanne Jenks et al., 2012). The contributors to the present volume are, I guess, probably on average younger than those to the first. Also, as the title indicates, they include scholars with more interest in Ireland and some who would probably not see themselves primarily as legal but more as social historians. Among the latter would be David Crouch, whose piece on ‘Testament and inheritance: the lessons of the brief widowhood of Isabel, countess of Pembroke’ is one of the highlights of this book. He brings into question the idea that bequest of land ceased after the Norman Conquest, although his mention of Glanvill in this context may neglect the fact that Glanvill seems to associate testaments with moveables. He also provides a very interesting collection of texts in an appendix. Appropriately for a Festschrift for such a distinguished editor of texts as Paul Brand, a further very useful edition of a fascinating text is provided by F. Donald Logan in his paper on ‘Two jurisdictions in dispute about canonical appeals: London and Canterbury, 1375–6.’ Much of the honorand’s editorial work has been on the earliest law reports, the precursors of the Year Books, and the Year Books are put to particularly good use by Gwen Seabourne in her examination of ‘“Et Subridet etc.”: Smiles, laughter and levity in the medieval Year Books.’ So enjoyable was this contribution to the history of law and emotions that I wished it were longer and filled with further quotation.

A further focus of Paul Brand’s work has been judicial enrichment and corruption—the distinction between the two often being a matter of perception, with perception changing according to political circumstance. Especially interesting here is Robin Frame’s study, ‘Profits and perils of an Irish legal career: Sir Elias Ashbourne (d. 1356), chief justice and marcher lord’. Frame makes clear how ‘reform’ could be tied to political circumstance and to changes of personnel, and that ‘reform’ could become embroiled with the personal and the political: ‘bouts of “reform” created a toxic atmosphere, in which malice, denunciation and blame-shifting flourished, with claims and counter-claims making their way to the king and council in England through both official and back channels’ (p. 128). He also shows the level of physical violence, sometimes amounting to feud, that judicial activity in Ireland might involve or encounter, providing a significant basis for comparison with elsewhere.

It is impossible to comment on all the pieces in the volume, brought to a very elegant close by David J. Seipp at the end of his essay on ‘Legal services for the poor in the early common law’. However, probably the two pieces of greatest significance for legal historians come early in the volume. William Eves examines ‘Justice delayed: Absent recognitors and the Angevin legal reforms, c.1200’. He finds that while the reforms aimed at greater speed, notably by seeking to reduce the effect of the absence of litigants, a perhaps unexpected problem was encountered with the absence of the recognitors who were meant to bring verdicts in the new actions. Such absence was a much greater problem in the central courts, be it at Westminster or in the king’s personal presence, than at the eyre, reinforcing arguments that the eyre was crucial to effectiveness of the reforms. Litigation over crime rather than land is the focus of Elizabeth Papp Kamali and Thomas A. Green’s article ‘A crossroads in criminal procedure: The assumptions underlying England’s adoption of trial by jury for crime’. Developing earlier work by both contributors, this paper considers how far juries had a say in criminal matters before 1215, and the ways in which the criminal jury affected the outcome of cases thereafter. It engages not just with the writings of medieval but also later legal historians, and deserves wide readership. It also raises, and perhaps might have considered further, the degree to which the two archetypal crimes (homicide and theft) may have been perceived and treated rather differently, an issue that could be profitably treated over a very long time period, starting in Anglo-Saxon England. Readers will be very glad of this second Festschrift for Paul Brand; in company with the present reviewer, who appeared in the first, the contributors will await—with a combination of trepidation and appreciation—the suggestions and corrections with which the honorand will doubtless in turn honour them.