Ever since the time of Maine and Maitland, historical jurisprudence – the examination of the history of a society living under a system of law – has been an important part of historical scholarship. The workings of the criminal law have been extensively studied by the most recent generation of early modern social historians, but the significance of the civil law, which so fascinated Victorian and Edwardian scholars, has proved less attractive. This is curious, for if the criminal law was (arguably) an agent of ideological control, the civil law worked at the heart of economic relationships to exert a direct influence on material life. Non-legal historians broadly accept both that legal ways of thinking permeated social relationships and economic activities much more obviously than in the present day and that law was a greater part of the fabric of everyday life. Yet many scholars remain reluctant to engage with the law's sometimes daunting complexity. For their part, practitioners of ‘legal history’ have sometimes been slow to meet the needs of non-specialists and they can remain trapped within what outsiders see as impenetrable styles of discourse, their discipline reserved largely for those with legal training who can understand the law's arcane technicalities and intricate modes of thought.

Chris Brooks' work has done much to challenge this division and to integrate legal history with mainstream social, economic and political history. Over the last thirty years he has not only set out the detail of the legal profession and the workings of the civil law but has also explained the implications of legal developments for the major themes in early modern history. Law, politics and society is another fine example of his work and an outstanding contribution to early modern English history. It is not just a summary of what others have said, nor even of Brooks' own previous publications, for it is firmly grounded in extensive archival research that makes it an important and often original monograph in its own right. Balanced and fair, it has a quiet yet powerfully independent voice that makes it worth reading in its entirety. It can be warmly recommended for any course in late medieval and early modern social, economic and political history as well as being a work that all scholars of the period, whatever their particular interests, can peruse with pleasure and ponder with profit.

Late medieval and early modern England had a plural legal system: common, canon, ecclesiastical, equity and customary law courts (among others) each had their own separate niche and distinctive development. Brooks tackles all its aspects. He explores legal processes and doctrines, describing with admirable clarity important but often bewilderingly complex legal devices. A good example is ‘uses’, a way of transmitting land in the late Middle Ages (pages 42–5). Armed with his lucid explanations of legal frameworks and fictions, operations and outcomes, historians will find it easier to understand many aspects of early modern England. Laying out what civil and criminal courts did, Brooks charts their fortunes and explains what their records tell us about society and politics; along the way he also warns gently against over-interpreting evidence of attitudinal and social change. One topic commonly neglected by early modernists is the manor, but Brooks explains its enduring significance in mediating relations between tenants and between lord and tenant. As well as the detail of the law and the courts there is also the big picture. For example, classical ideas of equity were revived at the end of the Middle Ages, making it the most dynamic area of law c.1450–1550 and helping to constitute the early modern period as what Keith Thomas has called ‘an age of conscience’. Brooks brings new light to issues as diverse as attitudes towards property, the relationships of family and community, ideas of obedience and resistance, the ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’ and the origins of the English Revolution. The only disappointment is that the book runs out of steam in the 1640s, for Brooks illuminates extremely well what happened before that, explaining (among much else) how common-law remedies to fundamental issues of debt and credit developed and how conceptions of the law slowly changed from ‘law-as-custom’ to ‘law-as-text’. But he stops short of analysing the last crucial segment of a prolonged period of profound legal change, c.1530–1700, leaving the reader aching to know more about important issues like the ‘great litigation decline’ that set in around mid-century. Having said that, our understanding of seventeenth-century law is still deficient in important ways and it is fortunate that Brooks has the opportunity to rectify these minor shortcomings when he completes the mammoth task of writing the 1625–1689 volume of the Oxford History of the Laws of England.