Abstract

The late Middle Ages were defined by an immense legal pluralism, encompassing multiple legal traditions and institutional forms. Studying late medieval law courts comparatively therefore implies balancing overarching developments with the many case-specific features of individual legal bodies. While the Council of Utrecht, the episcopal Consistory Court of York and the royal Parlement of Paris all developed from a ruler's judicial council into a (semi-)autonomous legal body, and all did so in an urban context, other characteristics differed markedly. In their composition, their size, the scale and nature of their jurisdiction, their spaces of operation, the textual record they produced, and the legal traditions from which they drew, these bodies constituted markedly distinctive producers of justice faced with similar challenges.

Keywords: medieval law courts, comparative history, Utrecht, York, Paris

One of the defining features of the late medieval legal landscape was its immense pluralism. This great diversity in legal forms found its clearest expression in the many different ways in which law courts came to be organized during this period. Drawing both on broader learned legal traditions, that is, those of Roman and Romano-canonical law, and – often more locally based – customary law, these courts took many shapes. In addition, extra-legal conditions, such as political configurations, communities’ social composition, existing economic relations and spatial contexts, influenced the way in which the courts were organized and functioned on a day-to-day basis.

All these factors make it necessary to elaborate in some detail on the three case studies at the heart of this book. In this chapter I will therefore set out to contextualize the Council of Utrecht, the Consistory Court of York and the Parlement of Paris from several perspectives. This first of all means a historical contextualization, asking how and why these law courts developed before and during the period treated here. Secondly, I will place them in a broader legal context, setting out the traditions of written and unwritten law on which they based themselves, the specific competences they claimed to hold, and the way in which these were subsequently translated into daily legal practice. None of the law courts considered here were purely legal institutions in the modern sense of the word.