Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
This book has been concerned with legal activity engaged in by professional lawyers on behalf of English mendicant and Bridgettine nuns. It has focused exclusively on the late medieval period since, before the end of the thirteenth century, substantial numbers of professional lawyers of cloistered nuns did not exist in England. I have argued that the successful establishment of the latter was closely related to the emergence of the former; that the evolution of a class of legal professionals directly affected the ability of strictly cloistered communities to survive for more than two hundred years, a time during which the English experienced the worst fiscal exigencies that war, famine, and plague could inflict. Now I would like to review some of the supporting evidence for my thesis and to underscore its relevance to the study of religious women.
The origins of the legal profession in England, as well as on the continent, have been exhaustively documented by historians. They have described how lawyers were trained in university law schools and at the Inns of Court. They have compiled lists of attorneys licensed to practice in specific courts, and even garnered choice bits from the anti-lawyer literature that had begun to flourish as professional lawyers became more numerous. Most importantly, legal historians have confirmed that the intricacies of courtroom procedure in late medieval society made professional lawyers indispensable agents in the courts of Church and Crown.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- English Nuns and the Law in the Middle AgesCloistered Nuns and their Lawyers, 1293–1540, pp. 169 - 174Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012