Exploration of manuscript records and civil law sources to provide a fuller account of the history of the legal profession in England.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the principal legal landmarks in the evolution of the law of the established Church of England from the Reformation to the present day. It explores the foundations of ecclesiastical law and considers its crucial role in the development of the Church of England over the centuries. The law has often been the site of major political and theological controversies, within and outside the church, including the Reformation itself, the English civil war, the Restoration and rise of religious toleration, the impact of the industrial revolution, the ritualist disputes of the 19th century, and the rise of secularisation in the twentieth. The book examines key statutes, canons, case-law, and other instruments in fields such as church governance and ministry, doctrine and liturgy, rites of passage (from baptism to burial) and church property. Each chapter studies a broadly 50-year period, analysing it in terms of continuity and change, explaining the laws by reference to politics and theology, and evaluating the significance of the legal landmarks for the development of church law and its place in wider English society.

The essays in this volume in honour of Paul Brand, Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, match his career and interests in the world of legal history as well as medieval social and economic history and textual studies. The topics explored include the Angevin reforms, legal literature, the legal profession and judiciary, land law, the relation between the crown and the Jews, the interaction of the Common Law with Canon and Civil Law, as well as procedural and testamentary procedures, the management of both ecclesiastical and lay estates and the afterlife of medieval learning. Like Brand’s own work, all the essays are grounded on detailed studies of primary sources. The result is a high quality scholarly book that will be of interest and use to medieval scholars, students and non-specialists with wide-ranging and varied interests. Contributors include Sir John H. Baker*, David Carpenter, David Crook, Charles Donahue, Jr, Barbara Harvey, Richard H. Helmholz, John Hudson, Paul Hyams, David J. Ibbetson, Susanne Jenks, Janet S. Loengard, Alexandra Nicol, Bruce R. O'Brien, Robert C. Palmer, Sandra Raban, Jonathan Rose, Henry Summerson and Sarah Tullis. *Professor Jon Baker is the winner of the American Society for Legal History’s 2013 Sutherland Prize. The prize, which is awarded annually, is for the best article on English legal history published in the previous year. The Prize was awarded to John baker for his article “Deeds Speak Louder Than Words: Covenants and the Law of Proof, 1290-1321" in Laws, Lawyers and Texts: Studies in Medieval Legal History in Honour of Paul Brand, ed. Susanne Jenks, Jonathan Rose and Christopher Whittick (2012). For more information about the Prize see: http://aslh.net/about-aslh/honors-awards-and-fellowships/sutherland-prize/

In the aftermath of sixth-century barbarian invasions, the legal profession that had grown and flourished during the Roman Empire vanished. Nonetheless, professional lawyers suddenly reappeared in Western Europe seven hundred years later during the 1230s when church councils and public authorities began to impose a body of ethical obligations on those who practiced law. James Brundage’s The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession traces the history of legal practice from its genesis in ancient Rome to its rebirth in the early Middle Ages and eventual resurgence in the courts of the medieval church. By the end of the eleventh century, Brundage argues, renewed interest in Roman law combined with the rise of canon law of the Western church to trigger a series of consolidations in the profession. New legal procedures emerged, and formal training for proctors and advocates became necessary in order to practice law in the reorganized church courts. Brundage demonstrates that many features that characterize legal advocacy today were already in place by 1250, as lawyers trained in Roman and canon law became professionals in every sense of the term. A sweeping examination of the centuries-long power struggle between local courts and the Christian church, secular rule and religious edict, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession will be a resource for the professional and the student alike.

Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done: it must be "seen to be done." Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers' manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline. Theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law's realization: a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law's power, --as it still does today.

This latest collection of studies by James Brundage deals with the emergence of the profession of canon law and with aspects of its practice in the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Substantial numbers of lawyers systematically trained in canon law first appeared in Western Europe during the second half of the 12th, century and in the 13th they began to dominate the hierarchy of the Western church. By 1250 canon law had grown into something more than a profitable occupation: it had become a recognizable profession in the strict meaning of the term as it is still used today. University law faculties trained aspiring canonists in the mysteries of their craft and put them through intellectually demanding exercises that terminated in a formal examination before they received their degrees. Judges in church courts formally admitted them to practice after verifying their educational qualifications and administered prescribed rules of conduct. Particular topics are the canonists' system of legal ethics, the education and training of canon lawyers in university law faculties, and some fundamental features of the professional practice of canon law, both in medieval Europe and in the crusading states of the Levant.

This volume brings together papers by a group of scholars, distinguished in their own right, in honour of James Brundage. The essays are organised into four sections, each corresponding to an important focus of Brundage's scholarly work. The first section explores the connection between the development of medieval legal and constitutional thought. Thomas Izbicki, Kenneth Pennington, and Charles Reid, Jr. explore various aspects of the jurisprudence of the Ius commune, while James Powell, Michael Gervers and Nicole Hamonic, Olivia Robinson, and Elizabeth Makowski examine how that jurisprudence was applied to various medieval institutions. Brian Tierney and James Muldoon conclude this section by demonstrating two important points: modern ideas of consent in the political sphere and fundamental principles of international law attributed to sixteenth century jurists like Hugo Grotius have deep roots in medieval jurisprudential thought. Patrick Zutshi, R. H. Helmholz, Peter Landau, Marjorie Chibnall, and Edward Peters have written essays that augment Brundage's work on the growth of the legal profession and how traces of a legal education began to emerge in many diverse arenas. The influence of legal thinking on marriage and sexuality was another aspect of Brundage's broad interests. In the third section Richard Kay, Charles Donahue, Jr., and Glenn Olsen explore the intersection of law and marriage and the interplay of legal thought on a central institution of Christian society. The contributions of Jonathan Riley-Smith and Robert Somerville in the fourth section round-out the volume and are devoted to Brundage's path-breaking work on medieval law and the crusading movement. The volume also includes a comprehensive bibliography of Brundage's work.