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Research Interests

At the moment I am engaged in three substantial but related research projects. One, which is just about completed, is an edition of readings, or lectures on statutes, given by common lawyers at the Inns of Court between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, which focus on the relationship between the church and the common law, based on Magna Carta c. 1 and Westminster I cc. 1-3. 

The second, which grew out of the edition, is a study of sanctuary and benefit of clergy in England between about 1400 and 1540.  Since the early twentieth century it has been generally agreed that these two methods of avoiding the death penalty for felony were outdated rights of a corrupt church more concerned with preserving its privileges than with the law and order needs of a developing state, which were appropriately swept away when the state reached a certain level of maturity.  The readings and the year books make it very clear that this argument simply doesn’t hold water, and recent scholarship on the practical functioning of the criminal justice system in this period suggests that sanctuary and benefit of clergy need to be more carefully placed in both their social and religious contexts to be properly understood.

My third research project, which also grew out of the edition, is a study of the fates of the ex-religious after the dissolution of the monasteries in England. I am examining the men and women who left the religious houses of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire between 1538 and 1540 and their subsequent careers.  More on research.

I am always happy to talk with anyone interested in these or related research fields.

Publications

Common Lawyers on the Church: Readings from the pre-Reformation Inns of Court.  Selden Society (2012) (forthcoming).

Memory, Orality and Life Records: Proofs of Age in Tudor England.” In Sixteenth Century Journal 40 (2009): 679-97.

Of good name and fame in the countrey’: Standards of conduct for Henry VII’s financial officials.”  In Historical Research 82 (2009): 547-59.

"The Payment of Pensions to the ex-Religious of Tudor Bedfordshire." In Midland History (2007): 41-67.

"Idiots, Lunatics and the Royal Prerogative in Early Tudor England." In Journal of Legal History 26 (2005): 1-20.

The Royal Prerogative and the Learning of the Inns of Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

K.R. Bartlett & Margaret McGlynn ed. Humanism and the Northern Renaissance.  Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2000.

Teaching the Law in a Time of Change: The Royal Prerogative and the Statute of Uses.” In Learning the Law ed. Jonathon Bush and Alain Wijffels, 211-25.  London: Hambledon Press, 1999.

With Richard J. Moll. “Chaste Marriage in the Middle Ages: ‘It were to hir a greet merite’.”  In Handbook of Medieval Sexuality: A Book of Essays, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, 103-22.  New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Doctoral Level supervisory privileges

Selden Society

I am the Canadian Secretary for the Selden Society, the only learned society and publisher devoted entirely to English legal history.  To learn more about the Society, please visit http://www.selden-society.qmw.ac.uk/.  I am happy to answer questions and enquiries from current and potential Canadian members.

Teaching

All the courses I teach deal with medieval or renaissance Europe. There is a feeling among many non-historians (and some historians) that this material is interesting, but not terribly useful. I disagree, strongly. I firmly believe that no period of history is intrinsically more interesting or more important than any other, though all of us have our preferences. The greatest value in history as a discipline is that it requires us to analyze our source materials rigorously, while engaging empathetically with our subjects, and communicating our arguments with clarity and, hopefully, grace. We certainly don’t have to agree with the viewpoints or actions of our subjects, but we do have to understand them, in their terms as well as ours, and we have to be able to explain them to others. To be able to fulfil those objectives is no mean feat, and provides a tremendous training for many academic and non-academic fields, as well as a good basis for a broad engagement with the increasingly small world in which we live.

As for the actual subject matter, that’s the fun part. Much of the attraction of medieval Europe for me is in examining the contradictions and tensions of a society which values stability and order above all, but which is forced by both outside and inside pressures to change constantly. Add the complication that the society is governed by values and assumptions that are radically different from today’s, which are yet remarkably complex and internally consistent and you have a gripping intellectual puzzle in a wide variety of social and cultural settings. The renaissance only becomes more interesting, as the pace of change increases, and Europeans have to deal with the implications of humanism, the printing press, the voyages of discovery and the Reformation, among other concerns. 

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