To inflict one more book upon a world already awash with information demands some justification beyond the need to propitiate that modern Moloch the Research Assessment Exercise. Nor is it enough to offer the familiar incantation that this is ‘an unjustly neglected subject’, for readers will have learned from grim experience that all too often such subjects have been very properly neglected by more discriminating scholars as being insignificant, abstruse or plain dull. So what justifies a book on the history of the county courts?

Aside from obtaining a grant of probate or letters of administration, a citizen's most likely involvement with the civil courts is through divorce or separation, or being subjected to (or much more rarely, initiating) claims for debt. These proceedings are nowadays overwhelmingly most likely to be conducted through the county court, so what was, for most of its 150 years, often described as ‘the poor man's court’ remains the court of law most frequently encountered by the people in civil disputes. Throughout its history many defendants, if not most, never actually attended the court, or at least got no further than the court office, but their perceptions of the legal system in its civil garb will certainly have been influenced, and perhaps shaped or reshaped, by that experience.

Those perceptions in turn help to shape society's conception of the law as it is and as it ought to be.