As a matter of law, maintenance involved the abusive abetting of litigation. It was an endemic problem in late medieval England, eroding trust and confidence in the operation of the legal system and undermining the stability of society and government. Historians have long recognized its pernicious influence in the courts and its contributions to factionalism and disorder. Jonathan Rose's new book significantly advances understanding of how maintenance evolved over time, marshalling a substantial body of case law to assess its broader significance. The book is a welcome addition to the field, offering a wealth of information about how maintenance operated in the real world and how the legal system sought to combat it.

Rose makes four major contributions to the understanding of maintenance. First, he offers a clear and thorough explanation of what contemporaries actually meant when they used the language of maintenance. Rose untangles a number of related concepts that were often jumbled together in the period, including embracery, champerty, ambidexterity, and procurement of false appeals, as well as several other forms of procedural abuse. He demonstrates the close association between maintenance and conspiracy and the gradual process by which the two came to be understood as distinct categories of abuse. Similarly, he provides a detailed account of how the courts worked out the distinction between lawful and unlawful forms of maintenance. Clarifying the role of attorneys is a good example: attorneys aided and abetted litigants, but ordinarily their “maintenance” of their clients’ pleas was lawful. Ascertaining where the boundary should be placed was not an easy task. The courts were surprisingly flexible and tolerant of efforts to help litigants, perhaps because, as Rose suggests, they wanted to restrain the amount of maintenance litigation they had to entertain.

In addition to clarifying concepts, Rose charts how maintenance litigation changed over time. Although maintenance is often viewed as a late medieval phenomenon, Rose demonstrates that there was a surprising level of concern and activity already in the reign of Edward I. His evidence shows that there were peaks and valleys in activity over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, typically associated with periods of stronger or weaker central authority. One of the book's most important findings involves the relationship between public and private prosecution of maintenance over time. Up until the last quarter of the fourteenth century, criminal prosecution of corrupt officials was the predominant way to address the problems associated with maintenance. During the last decades of the fourteenth century, however, and especially after the provision of new remedies by statute in 1377, civil litigation rose to the fore. Rose does not fully succeed in explaining why the balance between public and private prosecution changed over time, but the data showing the change are extensive and convincing.

The author's third important contribution stems from his consideration of the relationship between maintenance and other forms of social and political behavior that made it so visible and contentious, such as the wearing of livery and other forms of clientage. Maintenance was a serious legal concern in the period, but it was a more prominent source of complaint than a strictly legal view would allow. When social critics denounced maintenance as a perversion of justice, they often used it as a form of shorthand to articulate broader concerns about overly zealous partisanship and the failure of royal officials to provide fair and impartial governance. Rose deftly inserts critiques of maintenance and related forms of corruption into the ongoing debate about bastard feudalism. He treads cautiously when entering this debate, suggesting that maintenance contributed to an increase in factionalism and a decline in public order. At the same time, however, he acknowledges that contemporaries accepted lordship and retaining as part of the normal social order and that social critics were wont to overstate the extent of the problem.

Rose's fourth major contribution is the presentation of a new hypothesis to explain the volume of maintenance litigation during the period. Parliamentary petitions and social critiques typically portrayed maintenance as an abuse of power by overmighty subjects. Rose's analysis of the social standing of plaintiffs and defendants shows, however, that most maintenance litigation involved people below the level of the gentry. Furthermore, higher status litigants were more likely to occur as plaintiffs than as defendants, suggesting that they were more often the victims of legal abuse than the perpetrators. Rose concludes that, in practice at least, maintenance frequently functioned as a mode of legal harassment without any connection to factionalism. It was a form of “satellite litigation” that was typically ancillary to the substantive issue bringing two parties into court in the first place. Such a hypothesis cannot fully account for the rhetorical heat found in invectives against maintenance, but it certainly adds a new and important dimension to understanding of the subject.

As Rose notes in his conclusion, procedural abuse afflicts every legal system. Maintenance was a significant problem during and beyond the Middle Ages, but it did not produce a critical failure of the system. Because of Rose's book, there is now a much clearer sense of how to assess the legal and political implications of maintenance in a period of considerable turmoil.