Detective Fiction in the Archives: Court Records and the Uses of Law in Late Medieval England

摘要

This article explores two issues. The first is a problem in legal and social history: how did late medieval Londoners make use of the legal and archival powers of governing authorities in order to negotiate their lives? The second is a problem in historical methodology: how can thinking about the archives as historical agents rather than as inert repositories of evidence refine the way we use historical documents? My method is to juxtapose the methods of the archival turn – borrowing from Derrida, Farge, Steedman, Burton, and Stoler – with ‘law in society’, an approach to legal history deriving ultimately from E.P. Thomson, which underscores the workings of law through social interaction. A legal-history lens of this kind is particularly suited to examining pre-modern archives, as most pre-modern archival documents are records of legal proceedings and transactions. Legal documents were not just inert and transparent accounts of a legal proceeding or act. Such documents were meant to do something, to be, at least potentially, performative, or they were created because they might later be called upon, either by the recording authorities or by the parties involved, to demonstrate that particular people did something in a particular way at a particular time and place. Accordingly the way documents were recorded was subject to the various interests of the parties involved and the recording authorities. At the same time, legal archives also include documents that recorded what someone thought should happen, hoped would happen, wanted to pretend had happened – and yet sometimes had not happened at all, or at least not as recorded in the document. In being archived. However, those aspirational documents in a sense become what happened.