Detective Fiction in the Archives: Court Records and the Uses of Law in Late Medieval England

Historians are often compared to detectives, searching for clues and uncovering connections until at last the truth is found and the mystery is solved.¹ The fictional detective works the streets and the historian works the archives, but the process of building a case and of making logical inferences from scattered clues is sometimes remarkably similar. Historians, however, are no longer permitted the certainty that marked the conclusions of classic detective fiction: we are rarely, if ever, sure any more about who dunnit (whatever ‘it’ might be) or why. This constant epistemic doubt can be disorienting. On the one hand, many archival detectives, myself included, have, like our progenitor Jules Michelet, an essentially romantic sense that we can virtually see the dead through the dust of the document. The piece of parchment or paper, in some cases actually held by the hand of the person whom we are investigating, seems to create a literally tangible connection.² On the other hand, both theory and the practical problems of research warn us continually that this vision of the dead is a mirage, or at least a highly refracted image: each new clue can throw all previous evidence into completely new light, effectively changing the direction of the narrative running inside our heads.

My goal in this article is to explore two issues. The first is a problem in legal and social history: how did late medieval Londoners use the legal and archival powers of governing authorities in order to negotiate their lives? The second is a problem in historical methodology: how can thinking about the archives as historical agents rather than as inert repositories of evidence refine the way we use historical documents? Over the last several years, while working on the legal history of late medieval London, I have become interested in considering medieval legal history from the vantage point of the ‘archival turn’, an approach to working with archival sources influenced especially by Arlette Farge’s Goût de l’archive and Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever.³ Briefly stated, taking the archival turn demands that historians be more self-conscious not only about the meaning of the documents they study, but also about how the documents came to be archived in the first place, in whose interest they have been officially preserved, and how the documenting of particular events and processes – and not others – serves to shape what is known about the past. Although scholarship in several fields of historical study, especially imperial and colonial history, has embraced the archival turn, as yet few pre-modernists have responded to it.⁴ Nonetheless those of us who use archives compiled before the rise of the modern state (the entity generally seen as responsible for the constitution of modern archives) can both benefit from the insights of this literature and offer useful critiques to the modernist assumptions embedded in this (post)modernist scholarship.

It is particularly useful to juxtapose the methods of the archival turn with an approach to legal history that Peter Coss has termed ‘law in society’.⁵ Rather than focusing on the power of the state apparatus (the traditional emphasis of legal history), ‘law in society’ literature has underscored how law works through social interactions, with individuals effectively using the power of governing authorities and their laws to negotiate their lives. As E. P. Thompson famously asserted, law was at ‘every bloody level’ of social relations, deeply imbricated in their workings.⁶ The law and its archives were not infinitely malleable, of course; while those involved in legal processes wielded the law and the archive (understood broadly as any recording authority, be it royal, civic, or ecclesiastical), at the same time they had to operate within the framework the law established. If people used the law and the archive for their own purposes, in turn the law and the archive shaped or constrained people’s choices and relationships.

A legal history lens is particularly suited to examining pre-modern archives, as most pre-modern archival documents are records of legal proceedings and transactions. Those documents...