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Highfield House, University of Nottingham, 2 nd July 2015
The legal network of medieval and pre-modern Europe offered multiple routes to justice. For urban residents, borough courts and other civil courts offered widespread recourse to law, allowing ordinary residents to air complaints about economic disputes and interpersonal misbehaviour, arising from the interactions of everyday life. These courts existed alongside national criminal legal systems and a network of multiple other jurisdictions. Their records reveal how individuals, communities and officials perceived of the correct rules of economic and social relations and the steps that could be taken when these rules were not adhered to.
This conference explores a wide-ranging set of themes though the lens of town courts, with papers from historians from around the world working in both the medieval and Early Modern periods and on regions stretching across Europe. It will provide a valuable opportunity to consider the wealth of evidence contained within these records and what this evidence reveals about premodern urban society.
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(1a): Urban economic
communities Room A1
Richard Goddard (Nottingham),
‘Credit networks and the borough court’
Cathryn Spence (Guelph), ‘Space,
Place, and Society: The potential of
Scottish burgh court records’
Lisbeth Rodrigues (Lisbon),
‘Charity and courts: the Misericórdia of Lisbon during the eighteenth century’
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ELCOME
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TEA AND COFFEE
: 10.00
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ESSION
1: 10.30-12.00
(1b): Dispensing justice and
governing behaviour Room A2
Jane Laughton, ‘Judges, jurors and counsellors; plaintiffs, defendants and pledges: urban justice in medieval Chester’
Cheryl Butler (Southampton),
‘Accounting for morality: The
Southampton Mayor’s Court in the
Sixteenth Century’
C.J. (Jaco) Zuijderduijn (Leiden),
‘Crime in metropolis: men, women and the law in early-modern London and Amsterdam’

L UNCH : 12.00-1.00
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ESSION
2: 1.00-2.30
(2a): Jurisdictions and
neighbourhoods Room A1
(2b): The consumption of justice: race, immigration and
social status Room A2
Anna Anisimova (Moscow),
‘Borough Courts in Monastic Towns of Medieval England’
Milan Pajic (Ghent/Strasbourg),
‘Urban justice and aliens: Flemish
Immigrants and the Colchester
Borough Court’
Alan Kissane (Nottingham), ‘A civic register of lands and property: the records of Lincoln’s Burwamote
Court, c.1308-76’
Susan Maddock, ‘Neighbours and neighbourhoods in Margery Kempe’s
Lynn’
Matthew Stevens (Swansea),
‘Race and borough courts in late medieval North Wales’
Ans Vervaeke and Griet
Vermeesch (Brussels), ‘The clientele of the local law court. The cases of the Liberty of Bruges and the city of Leiden during the eighteenth century’
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ESSION
3: 3.00-4.30
(3): Precedent and practice in urban courts Room A1
Esther Liberman Cuenca (Fordham), ‘Cases in Custom: The Idea of Legal
Precedent in Borough Customary Law’
Teresa Phipps (Nottingham), ‘Female legal status in practice: reconstructing the life of Agnes Halum of Nottingham’
Jeremy Goldberg (York), ‘The Priest of Nottingham, the Holy Household of
Ousegate, and the Cross-Dressing Barmaid of Burford: Telling Tales in Court’
T
EA AND COFFEE
: 4.30-5.00
K
EYNOTE
: 5.00-6.00
Christopher Dyer (Leicester), ‘Governing a paradox. How did lords manage towns that were not boroughs, and boroughs that were not towns?’
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ONFERENCE
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INNER
: 7.00