Ever since Christopher Brooks revealed the full extent of the English litigation boom of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the “law mindedness” that it encouraged and embodied, increasing numbers of scholars have sought to understand the history of legal institutions and to discern the legal, social, and cultural significance of lawsuits. Others continue to mine the rich seams of evidence that survive in voluminous legal archives, made increasingly accessible by digital finding aids and initiatives such as the Anglo-American Legal Tradition website (that makes available more than 10 million photographs of documents from Westminster courts). The fruits of these labors are transforming understandings of subjects as disparate as state formation and political culture, gender relations, and the nature and extent of “neighborliness.” Yet puzzles remain about the motivations driving individual litigants and about how they navigated, and sometimes sought to exploit, complex legal landscapes made up of multiple overlapping jurisdictions. L.R. Poos's magisterial study of the legal machinations of a single family from Northwest Lancashire offers insights into both these questions, while also providing a fascinating and important history of a range of matters in England's north.
Poos's focus is the Rishton family in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. Drawing upon a remarkable abundance of legal evidence and estate papers, he has painstakingly reconstructed intricate narratives of the Rishtons’ lives that read at times like scenes from a lurid soap opera. Roger Rishton spent years fighting various of his neighbors, physically as well as legally, often over disputed visions of the correct use of sacred space in the chapelry church of Church Kirk. One rival he wounded with an arrow before later taking his pews out of the church and burning them. Roger's son Ralph, as Poos's title suggests, embarked on three marriages of questionable validity. In 1531, when he was only nine years old, he married Ellen Towneley who later succumbed to mental illness. Bribing Chester officials, he obtained a forged annulment so that he could marry Elizabeth Parker in 1546 after he made her pregnant and then in 1561 sought to have that marriage annulled so he could marry his mistress, Ann Stanley. She was the wife of a close relation whose property the pair worked to misappropriate.
Ralph Rishton's marriages in defiance of canon law and social convention have been examined before, but Poos delves deeper to explore associated property entanglements and to correct former errors. He uses a chronological structure to reconstruct each episode, and then intersplices these with extended analytical treatments of the wider issues raised. These include a detailed examination of the unusual prominence of child marriages among the Lancashire gentry; analysis of how legal institutions and activities worked to bind together networks of social elites; and a fascinating exploration of the afterlife of the Ralph Rishton story in popular memory, through the history of the newspapers and publications in which antiquarians and journalists retold (and reshaped) it for centuries. Family trees and an appendix providing a chronology of events and legal maneuvers help readers keep on top of complicated detail, and maps show key locations while also showcasing innovative methods of mapping that other historians may wish to emulate.
Ralph Rishton's marital adventures occupy center stage, shedding light on popular understandings of marriage law and the willingness of Rishton (and others) to evade ecclesiastical restrictions on remarriage. However, the lead actor in Poos’ drama is the legal system. The Rishtons litigated in eleven different legal jurisdictions stretching from Lancaster and York to London, and the surviving records provide a rare opportunity to examine legal processes and strategies in their entirety, rather than from the perspective of a single court or specific legal action. Poos pays particular attention to the records of the courts of the Duchy and Palatinate of Lancaster, largely neglected since the mid-twentieth century, offering vivid demonstrations of their richness as a historical source.
In common with many other historians who debate the meaning of the rise in litigation, Poos concludes that most individuals regarded lawsuits as one element in broader strategies aimed at inducing settlements and resolution, if not reconciliation. However, he also acknowledges the animosity and violence that could accompany these utilitarian aims. Getting to the heart of these questions, he examines the nature and limits of court records as historical evidence, emphasizing the narrative elements in the competing stories at the heart of legal conflicts. At the same time, he takes issue with scholars such as Frances Dolan who assert that these textual elements irretrievably obscure historical truths. Poos is adamant that careful methods of corroboration can allow for the extraction of accurate information from pleadings and depositions, although he admits that the necessary extra-legal materials rarely survive.
Love, Hate, and the Law in Tudor England offers much to savor and admire and deserves a wide readership, the sensational detail of its stories matched by the rigor, breadth, and originality of its analysis.
