Publication – Tom Johnson, « Law in Common. Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England »
Note Regidel :
Bien que ne traitant pas directement des registres de délibérations, la réflexion de l’auteur embrasse largement des thématiques des plus utiles à la compréhension institutionnelle et politique des communautés, par le biais d’une normativité intégrée aux comportements et stratégies des individus comme des groupes. Outre le chapitre spécifiquement consacré aux villes (ch. 2), les passages consacrés aux communautés rurales amènent à reconsidérer la notion de communauté sur une autre base que celle de la simple spatialité territoriale (cf. J. Morsel) ou de la communication politique (cf. M. Hébert).
L’originalité de l’approche de Johnson est la mise en évidence de la fabrique du droit local par le bas, par les usages des cours de justice locales, qui révèlent les définitions très concrètes et pratiques que les communautés font du bien commun.
Plus largement, l’ensemble de l’ouvrage, par une démarche inductive aboutissant en sa seconde partie à considérer la légalité comme un environnement non seulement théorique, mais aussi pratique et objet de transactions quotidiennes, d'”agency”, permet de renverser les usages parfois convenus du droit en histoire.
There were tens of thousands of different local law-courts in late-medieval England, providing the most common forums for the working out of disputes and the making of decisions about local governance. While historians have long studied these institutions, there have been very few attempts to understand this complex institutional form of ‘legal pluralism’.
Law in Common provides a way of understanding this complexity by drawing out broader patterns of legal engagement. Tom Johnson first explores four ‘local legal cultures’ – in the countryside, in forests, in towns and cities, and in the maritime world- that grew up around legal institutions, landscapes, and forms of socio-economic practice in these places, and produced distinctive senses of law.
Johnson then turns to examine ‘common legalities’, widespread forms of social practice that emerge across these different localities, through which people aimed to invoke the power of law. Through studies of the physical landscape, the production of legitimate knowledge, the emergence of English as a legal vernacular, and the proliferation of legal documents, the volume offers a new way to understand how common people engaged with law in the course of their everyday lives.
Drawing on a huge body of archival research from the plenitude of different local institutions, Law in Common offers a new social history of law that aims to explain how common people negotiated the transformational changes of the long fifteenth century with, and through legality.

Tom Johnson grew up in Ipswich. He completed degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, and his doctoral work at Birkbeck, University of London. He held a junior research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, before joining the University of York as a Lecturer in Late Medieval History. In 2018-2019, he was a Fellow at The Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University.
Table des matières :
Introduction: Local Legal Cultures and Common Legalities in Late-Medieval England
Part I: Local Legal Cultures
1: Rural Legal Culture: Ordaining Community
2: Urban Legal Culture: Institutional Density
3: Maritime Legal Culture: Expertise and Authority
4: Forest Legal Culture: Accounting for Vert and Venison
Part II: Common Legalities
5: The Legal Landscape
6: The Economy of Legitimate Knowledge
7: Legal English and the Vernacularization of Law
8: Common Legal Documents
Conclusion: Towards a Common Constitution
Bibliography
Informations pratiques :
Tom Johnson, Law in Common. Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019. 352 Pages, 234x153mm. ISBN: 9780198785613. Prix : 75 £.
Source : Oxford University Press