English manorial-court documentation, in many respects unique among European countries for its information pertaining to the bulk of rural dwellers in the middle ages, has long provided the most voluminous evidence for studying many aspects of medieval society. We have no doubt that it will continue to do so; yet, as the metaphorical title of our original essay was intended to convey, the ‘window’ through which we may view this society has finite dimensions. It was our intention to suggest some ways in which these dimensions can be more clearly understood. At its most basic level, then, our concern was with one of the most fundamental questions of legal as well as social history: the relationship between the scope of a legal arena's purview and the society in which that arena operated. Our focus was, however, squarely upon Zvi Razi's attempts at demographic inference from the Halesowen court material because he has made the boldest claims to date for the ability of manorial courts’ recorded transactions to reflect the whole of their communities’ populations and activities.

The stategic role played by population movement, and its interaction with agrarian environment, in current theories of medieval economic development stands in sharp contrast to the relatively sparse direct evidence that can be marshalled to elucidate demographic change in medieval England. Indeed, work done to date has relied largely upon indirect indicators such as rents, prices, and wages or landscape changes associated with processess of reclamation, colonization, settlement resiting, shrinkage and desertion.