Esther Liberman Cuenca

On graduating high school, many American students believe that the Middle Ages was full of knights, war, all-powerful popes, and, if their content went beyond Europe, potentially an incredibly wealthy man named Mansa Musa, and a Mesoamerican ballgame. In this version of the past, medieval people were backward, dirty, and all believed the earth was flat. While people who work within this chronological time period recognize its complexity, most students are not exposed to the history of the middle ages until they take upper level or graduate classes at universities, if they ever get that far. Given recent national and international events, it is evident that leaving this complicated and nuanced history for so late in a person’s educational journey is doing a social as well as educational disservice. In a quest to help teachers remediate this problem, several scholars of the global Middle Ages and Medievalisms have written lesson guides to be used by teachers of World and United States history for grades six through twelve. the goal is to create a collection that a teacher would be able to implement in their classroom with minimal additional work.

On graduating high school, many American students believe that the Middle Ages was full of knights, war, all-powerful popes, and, if their content went beyond Europe, potentially an incredibly wealthy man named Mansa Musa, and a Mesoamerican ballgame. In this version of the past, medieval people were backward, dirty, and all believed the earth was flat. While people who work within this chronological time period recognize its complexity, most students are not exposed to the history of the middle ages until they take upper level or graduate classes at universities, if they ever get that far. Given recent national and international events, it is evident that leaving this complicated and nuanced history for so late in a person’s educational journey is doing a social as well as educational disservice. In a quest to help teachers remediate this problem, several scholars of the global Middle Ages and Medievalisms have written lesson guides to be used by teachers of World and United States history for grades six through twelve. the goal is to create a collection that a teacher would be able to implement in their classroom with minimal additional work.

Drawing on a quantitative analysis of hundreds of printed and archival sources from 77 towns, The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval England is the first cross-regional investigation into the history of urban customs since Mary Bateson's seminal, two-volume work Borough Customs (1904-1906). In contrast to English common law and church law, which both had long institutional and academic traditions devoted to training men in their legal philosophies, customary law constituted local practices that acquired the force of law over time. Urban customary law regulated political officeholding, trade, property holding, and even moral behaviour in English towns. The Making of Urban Customary Law argues that urban customs, which governed the lives of people in English towns, were crucial to the development of a distinct, bourgeois identity in England-an evolution that this new study tracks from the early twelfth to the late sixteenth centuries. In the years following the Black Death, and especially during the Reformation period, this law became more concerned with defining political authority, maintaining morality, and articulating a consensus about the “common good” for townspeople. This book makes two principal claims: First, customary law advanced the business interests of an urban oligarchy. These were urban (male) elites who drafted laws and obtained privileges to enhance their wealth and assert their political independence from local lords, and often made claims about the legitimacy of their privileges or laws by rooted them in history or some kind of ancestral past. These lawmakers also made considerable efforts to establish their identities as morally upright and even-handed patriarchs. In so doing, urban customary law played a central role in the development of a distinct bourgeois identity in medieval and Reformation England. Second, this law lent particular meanings to the “common good” in towns, as it helped these lawmakers articulate policies that cohered to their vision of an ideal civic community.