Late medieval towns were bustling spaces, circumscribed by rules and awash with ideas of good governance, proper hierarchy, and market integrity. In The Making of Urban Customary Law in Medieval and Reformation England, Esther Liberman Cuenca studies the townspeople and their ideas as expressed in hundreds of borough customs and charters from England, Scotland, and Ireland between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. Drawing upon careful qualitative and quantitative analysis of custumals, incorporation charters, compilations, oaths, and ordinances, Cuenca carefully teases out what the body of customary law meant for those living within urban spaces. She argues that, taken together, these documents reveal a worldview of the urban elite alongside the social realities of the spaces in which that elite lived and worked.

Cuenca designs her study to showcase ideals expressed about governance (in the first three chapters) and the lived experience of that governance (in the last three chapters). After an explanation of the origins of customary law in England, most often derived from initial charters that detailed town formation and that established certain privileges, Cuenca trains her focus on the all-important role of the town clerk in the establishment and preservation of custom. In charters, custumals, and compilations these individuals preserved details that were relevant to the officials about tolls, property, trade and guild regulations, and the parameters and responsibilities of the borough court. Common clerks, who could be authors, scribes, compilers, and/or commentators (55), were “instrumental in the codification of urban customary law” (56) and were expected to provide advice and follow discretion in their tasks. As “information experts” (69), clerks were a critical link in establishing and preserving the legitimacy of urban governance, a process Cuenca details in chapter three. This legitimacy was derived most often from past legal authorities (like the king), from past usage, or from another borough (i.e. as a “daughter” of a “mother” town). For example, Gloucester claimed the latter type of connection from London (104) and was one of 41 towns that established a connection like this in a sample of 100 town charters.

In the fourth chapter, Cuenca argues that across these records—namely, in 336 clauses found in 66 charters of five towns and 711 customs in custumals—clerks identified four main arenas that help us understand the meaning of the “common good” for contemporary civic officials: the market, public safety, officeholding, and the court. There was not one lone definition of the “common good,” and, indeed, different towns articulated different constructions. For example, maintaining the public good in fourteenth-century Nottingham focused on peace-keeping, while in thirteenth-century Ipswich, officials were more concerned with managing the marketplace. Through activities like the setting of prices of bread in Norwich, levering fines for broken gutter heads in Beverly, and election procedures in Colchester and Southampton, then, Cuenca claims that customary law balanced “ensuring the town’s welfare and securing the stability of its government” (135). In the following chapter (chapter five), Cuenca carries forward the same database to explore how townswomen and unenfranchised men (including non-citizen merchants), those individuals who almost always were without formal political power, experienced this “common good.” In this chapter, perhaps more than others, Cuenca draws upon scholarship to contextualize the quantitative analysis to argue that “customary law amplified gendered inequalities and magnified class difference … But [women and unenfranchised men] were crucial to one of the main organs of justice—the borough court—as litigants who rendered fines and paid fees.” (177) Finally, in the last chapter, Cuenca examines oaths as “expressions of civic ideals” (185) that first appeared in urban records in the fourteenth century, expanding the study to include custumals from England, Scotland, and Ireland. This chapter runs later in time than the others, through the Henrician Reformation, and Cuenca offers that the political pressures of the later period may have led to an increase in emphasis on fairness and competency in oaths (186) in addition to the earlier emphasis on transparency.

Across the work, Cuenca effectively draws upon her data in different ways in order to understand the complexities of urban governance. Her use of examples to contextualize the data is compelling and her writing is clear and engaging. She is successful at explaining how customary law reveals understandings of memory, community, belonging, and governance while also explicating the way that the boundaries of enfranchisement were classed and gendered. Consistently throughout her work, Cuenca provides critical context to understand her arguments about urban legal developments. For example, in her first chapter, she describes the parallel developments in customary, common, and ecclesiastical law, suggesting the expansion of a professional class that incorporated clerks in all three areas of the law, and in chapter five, she draws upon studies on civic masculinity to add depth to her discussion of unenfranchised men. Cuenca is also careful to situate English developments within European urban developments throughout the book (from town establishment to women and office holding).

The Making of Urban Customary Law will be helpful reading for scholars and students of urban spaces. For the latter, the methodology that Cuenca employs—namely, quantitative analysis supported by two robust, relational databases, complemented by notable cases, key replicated passages, and comparative examples—will serve as a compelling exemplar for similar projects. Social, gender, urban, and legal historians will find much of value in this work as well as Cuenca articulates the important role of clerks in the establishment of legal and administrative apparatuses and as she elucidates the ways in which urban-dwellers pursued careers, negotiated status, understood authority, and formulated identity. Ultimately, Cuenca is successful in supporting her claim that the development of customary law in medieval and early modern England is important for both understanding the development of medieval law more broadly and for appreciating the formation of ideas of urban governance more specifically.