The Slaying of Sir William Pennington: Legal Narrative and the Late Medieval English Archive

On 20 April 1532, an English gentleman and courtier, Sir William Pennington, was killed in a sword fight steps away from the royal palace of Westminster. For political reasons, the prosecution of Pennington's homicide likely suppressed the real context of the quarrel, resulting in a fictional alternative version of events on the official record of the court of King's Bench. This article examines closely the narratives contained in the King's Bench plea roll in order to consider larger questions about the nature of legal documents as historical evidence. Understanding how this legal narrative worked involves considering legal forms and expectations — the requirements of legal genres such as indictments — along with the particular exigencies of the political moment

Love and Marriage in Late Medieval London

Depositions (or testimony) in marriage cases brought before fifteenth-century English church courts reveal the attitudes and feelings of medieval people towards the marital bond.https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_teamsdp/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Legend of John Baptist Grimaldi: Sexual Comportment and Masculine Styles in Early Tudor London

A small but wealthy and powerful group of Italian merchants lived in early sixteenth-century London, representing the international banking and mercantile firms of Genoa, Florence, Venice, Lucca, and other northern Italian city-states. Though favourites at the royal court, with direct access to the ears of the king himself, these Lombards (as the English termed them) were highly unpopular with their English mercantile rivals. London merchants’ hostility drew obviously from the economic competition the Italians posed, but their animosity was cultural as well as commercial. One particular bone of contention was that Italian merchants did not play by English rules regarding sexual relationships: they were accused of seducing the wives and daughters of respectable men. The Italians may have pursued such seductions not simply for sexual gratification but also as a strategy to embarrass and shame their English counterparts. At the same time, it is also clear that there were quite different sexual ethics at work among the English and Italian mercantile elites that signified incompatible reactions to sexual situations

Sanctuary Seekers in England, 1380-1557 (pdf - by order of surname)

Sanctuary Seekers in England is a spreadsheet presenting all the instances of sanctuary-seeking in England that I have uncovered for the period 1380-1557, more than 1800 seekers altogether. It is a companion to my book, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400-1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

Sanctuary and the Legal Topography of Pre-Reformation London

Through an examination of St. Martin Le Grand, a privileged territory in the heart of late medieval London, Shannon McSheffrey argues that pre-Reformation English sanctuaries must be understood not only in the context of complex intertwinings of conceptions of kingship, justice, mercy, and Christian religion, but in the quotidian practice and observance of the sanctuary space by those who lived in and around the sanctuary. By 1400, a number of English religious houses had come to offer permanent sanctuary to accused criminals, political refugees, debtors, and aliens. These small territories, which exercised varying extents of juridical and political autonomy, considerably complicated the jurisdictional map of late medieval England. Determining and recognizing the boundaries of the sanctuary territory was difficult: the bounds of the precinct were marked in some places by walls and gates, but in other places by notional, and often disputed, lines in the middle of streets. The meaning of the sanctuary was constituted through claims, counter-claims, and royal confirmations; through precedent and custom; and through how particular kinds of individuals--those “privileged” of the sanctuary--inhabited and used the territory. Although the royal free chapel and sanctuary of St. Martin Le Grand, like other English sanctuaries, was felled along with a host of ecclesiastical institutions in the dissolutions of the English Reformation, McSheffrey argues that we cannot understand its late medieval and early Tudor history teleologically, through the hindsight of its dissolution. Sanctuary, and the sacrality that underpinned it, continued to function in the early sixteenth century, not as an obsolete relic of earlier conceptions of law, punishment, and the role of the church, but because it dovetailed closely with late medieval and early Tudor conceptions of law, kingship, and Christian charity