History and the Law: A Love Story by Carolyn Steedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 285 pp., £22.99)
| Author | Michael Lobban |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12236 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
HISTORY AND THE LAW: A LOVE STORY by CAROLYN STEEDMAN
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 285 pp., £22.99)
At the outset of this stimulating collection of essays, Carolyn Steedman tells
us that the book ‘is about people’s relationships with, to and under the law
in the past, and modern historians’ understanding of the law as experienced
by those people’ (p. 1). The essays offered concentrate in particular on three
intersecting themes: how the poor experienced the law and used it for their
own ends; the legal disabilities experienced bywomen; and the perception and
portrayal of the law in literature, particularly in the works of that celebrated
couple, baron et feme, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. At the
same time, they offer prisms through which to reflect on methodological
questions about how law should be studied, and what such a study can
teach us.
The ‘law’ studied here is not the legal doctrine so beloved of generations
of (particularly English) legal historians, who have tended to concentrate on
the arguments deployed in civil litigation in the superior courts of law at
Westminster Hall. The world of the doctrinal lawyers looks like very alien
territory to Steedman. Reading eighteenth-century law reports like Burrow’s,1
she is exasperated to find that she learns nothing about the dates of trials or
even the dates of events under investigation. While ‘happenings are pretty
meaningless to a historian unless they have a date and a context by which
to interpret them’ (p. 10), in the world of law ‘Nothing has dates!’ (p. 9).
Furthermore, the narratives found in legal records are often full of legal
fictions and forms which may ‘tell law’s story’ but which do not address
those questions that interest historians – questions about ‘what happened
to people in real life’ (p. 232). Legal records, she notes (quoting Sir John
Baker),2‘were created for an entirely different purpose from that of enriching
the study of history’, and historians who complain about law’s opacity or
indifference ‘are told to just get over it’ (p. 10, emphasis in original). But
these records are not what interests Steedman. Rather than exploring the
language used by lawyers on behalf of elite litigants, she prefers to look
from the viewpoint of those who were brought before the courts or who were
caught up in the ‘legal web’ spun around their lives by the poor law, the law
of coverture, or the law of servitude. These people – maidservants, paupers,
women of the middling sort, artisans – also learned to speak the language
of law, ‘all of them thinking, talking, manipulating, resisting the law, for the
purposes of their everyday life’ (p. 4). It is the perspective of those who were
oppressed by the law, and who protested against that oppression, that interests
Steedman.
The first two essays in this collection explore two different kinds of letters
sent by the poor to those against whom they had a grievance. In ‘Letters of
1J.Burrow,Reports of Cases Adjudged in the Court of King’s Bench, 5 vols (1766–1780).
2 J.H.Baker,‘AuthenticTestimony?FactandLawinLegalRecords’inJ.H.Baker,
Collected Papers on English LegalHistory, vol. 3 (2013) 1513.
519
© 2020 The Author. Journal of Law and Society © 2020 Cardiff UniversityLaw School
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