Until now, the focus of this book has been on the media – be they of a spatial, enacted, oral or textual nature – constituting the process of court communication. We have seen how law courts formed the locus of an extensive communicative activity, where diverse social issues were negotiated between its participants. The latter, while present in each of the previous chapters, have not stood at the centre of attention as such. Yet it was participants’ intentions and their subsequent activities that drove much of these processes of socio-legal communication. In recent years, the users of law courts have received greater attention from social and legal historians. Daniel Lord Smail, for one, has proposed to approach developments in legal practice from a consumerist perspective. While courts were traditionally considered the exclusive result of rulers’ attempts at acquiring socio-political monopolies of power, Smail emphasized the role of the law's consumers, that is, those pursuing their cases in court, in shaping the court-based legal system of many late medieval societies. It was at least partly because litigants actively chose to invest in a legal process that courts could become such dominant forms of legal practice. Thus, the agents of change in this period were not just authorities coercing society into using their courts, but rather the people themselves who considered it profitable to bring their disputes there, instead of looking for an alternative solution.