Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Institutions of law and the culture of the law in England in the central middle ages, especially from about 1000 to 1250.
- Institutions of the church and the roles and influence of churchmen, 1100-1400
Current research
A third volume of Ely episcopal acta covering the period from 1256 to 1337 is in progress, and there are various articles in press, including some on London.
Research Interests
My main research interest is in the institutions of law and the culture of the law in England in the central middle ages, and especially from about 1000 to 1250. This has arisen from my earlier work on 12th-century charters and acta, where I concentrated upon the uses to which these documents were put, and upon understanding the structures within which they were used.
I have worked on the processes by which courts made decisions in this period. This focus on procedure has been productive, because it directs attention to who was allowed to speak and determine matters; whose voice was preferred in cases of divergence, and how precedence was accorded; how the agenda of the court was settled. In this way, the relatively formal setting of courts exposes to an extent little seen elsewhere the structures of local power, how shires and hundreds ran themselves, and how the king's power and representatives interacted with them. As part of this, I will produce a new edition and translation of the Leges Henrici Primi, the longest and one of the most important of the legal texts surviving from twelfth-century England, which will appear as part of the Early English Laws project.
I am also interested in the institutions of the church and the roles and influence of churchmen, 1100-1400; my first book was an edition of documents from the diocese of Ely 1109-1197 which illustrated these themes, and was published by the British Academy as part of its authoritative English Episcopal Acta series. A second volume, covering the period 1198-1256, was published in 2013, and a third volume covering the years 1256-1337 has been commissioned.