The transition of the hundred courts in pre-Conquest England to the lords’ courts of the twelfth century is a phenomenon much discussed yet little understood. The lords’ courts provided England's new Anglo-Norman aristocracy with a means of consolidating their authority, resolving disputes over land or privileges, and instituting an administrative structure that clarified the rights and obligations of those at every level of society. Although typically viewed as a relatively new phenomenon linked to the establishment of Norman landholding practices in post-Conquest England, in Kings, Lords, and Courts in Anglo-Norman England, Nicholas Karn argues that the emergence of lords’ courts resulted instead from the appropriation of the functions and prerogatives of the legal assemblies of the later Anglo-Saxon period. Given the author, it should come as no surprise that this argument is made with care, rigor, and a meticulous attention to the nuances of his primary sources. The scope, clarity (not something to be sniffed at these days!), and compelling treatment of the evidence makes Karn's study a valuable contribution to the study of early Norman law and legal practice.

Karn begins the volume with a discussion of what he calls “the later Anglo-Saxon paradigm,” which he defines as “complex lordship” (28–29). Under this model, he writes, “different lords or the same lord could hold or claim different kinds of interest in the same individuals” (49). As a result, “lords exercised their claims to lordship in the communal courts, where it would have been possible to claim dues from many, even those who owed dues to other lords” (49). However, the Conquest brought with it a new aristocracy whose aspirations and views of legal authority differed significantly from their predecessors. For these lords, according to Karn, “lordship was a means for exercising dominance over others, and for creating a miniature society in which they might control those around them and under them” (51). Achieving this ideal meant gradually chipping away at the prerogatives of the hundred courts, beginning with soke (the right to local jurisdiction). The claim of absolute jurisdiction over the hundred allowed the lord to monopolize the loyalty and dues of his dependents: where complex lordship allowed for the possibility that a peasant might owe obligations to different lords, under the new system those obligations were owed to only one. As further prerogatives were stripped away, the center of legal authority shifted from the hundred to the lord's court. In Karn's words, “by 1100, the hundred had been substantially weakened. This weakening was not the result of leadership from kings, but rather was due to the work of mostly French lords, who chose to withdraw their dependents from it” (126). Unsurprisingly, though, the monopolization of legal authority bred disputes over jurisdiction, which provided the king—“the ultimate determiner of cases” (149)—with a means of extending royal power through his involvement in disputes over local or regional authority. This claim leads to what is perhaps Karn's most significant claim, namely that the development of lords’ courts provided a legal framework within which other social and economic developments—especially manorialization—occurred. Karn concludes the book with an appendix setting out the evidence for the office of justice between 1100 and 1154. The charts contained here are invaluable and will likely prove the basis of much scholarship to come.

The primary contribution of the book lies in the way Karn situates the development of lords’ courts, and by extension regional administration, within a history of legal practice that stretches back well before 1066. The result is an account in which the instruments of Anglo-Norman political authority emerged from legal developments grounded in the exercise of regional legal authority—itself the result of the intersection of Anglo-Saxon and Norman legal practices—rather than one in which aristocratic legal prerogatives were largely privileges granted by a central power in the form of the king. Though adherents to a more traditional view of Anglo-Norman government will likely find points with which to quibble, Karn's argument is convincing and sure to be the foundation of much future work.

This being said, Karn's argument suffers from one weakness: convincing as his broader account is, his treatment of Old English law and legal practice relies too much on generalities that can mask more substantial continuities between the pre- and post-Conquest periods. This view of pre-Conquest law serves the argument's historical arc, yet it does a disservice to English legal culture of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Many of the qualities Karn attributes to post-Conquest lordship can be found earlier in the earldoms of Æthelstan “Half-King,” Ælfhere of Mercia, and Godwin of Wessex. Likewise, the view that jurisdictional disputes became a significant feature of legal practice only after the Conquest overlooks much contradictory evidence from the earlier period. In part, Karn's account of pre-Conquest law may be the result of a disproportionate reliance on Tom Lambert's book, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (2017), which receives significantly greater mention than does the work of such other scholars as Patrick Wormald, Stephen Baxter, Richard Abels (whose 1988 book Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England is a surprising omission), and Andrew Wareham (whose 2005 Lords and Communities in Early Medieval East Anglia is likewise absent). In no way is this a criticism of Lambert, whose book is outstanding; rather, it is to suggest that the discussion of Anglo-Saxon lordship would have been richer and more nuanced if grounded in the work of a wider range of scholars.

I do not want to make too much of this, however. Karn's volume is a triumph, both a major contribution to our understanding of Anglo-Norman politics and valuable analysis of the legal practices that laid the foundation for the emergence of Common Law. He is to be congratulated on a book that will certainly shape the discussion of this topic for years to come.