Legal historians writing about the development of law and legal institutions in later medieval England have in the main concentrated on the national royal court system, its justices and lawyers, and on the law of these national courts. This is understandable: the historian needs evidence to work with and the royal courts have this in abundance. Historians have also worked fairly intensively on the surviving records of local manorial courts, though these have attracted greater interest from social and economic historians than from legal historians. The urban courts of later medieval England have, however, been largely neglected. There is no general monograph on them, and even the courts and the legal custom of the city of London, in the Middle Ages as now the most important of England's towns, have hitherto lacked their modern historian. It is this major gap that Penny Tucker's study now fills. She has faced a particularly challenging task given the almost total disappearance of the records of the sheriffs' courts (perhaps the most important of the city's courts) and major losses from the series of mayor's court records.

An initial chapter sets the administration of law in the city in context with a brief section on the social and economic profile of the city and a rather longer section exploring the relationship between the city's legal custom and courts and the developing common law. Chapter 2 then provides a survey of the distinctive features of city law and custom, mainly in terms of the city's distinctive remedies and procedures, but also the city's own substantive rules. The main focus of the book is, however, institutional. Chapter 3 looks at the prehistory of the city's main law courts prior to 1300 and at their development down to 1550, focusing mainly on the different kinds of business with which each of the city courts dealt. Chapter 4 assesses the evidence for the location of these courts and when they sat and also for the levels of activity in each court. The focus of chapter 5 is on procedure and pleading (including the change to written pleadings), the different modes of proof employed and on amercements, damages, and costs in cases determined by judgment, with a separate discussion of the procedures followed in equitable cases in the Inner Chamber of the Mayor's Court. In chapter 6 Tucker looks at the principal actors in the city courts: those who were active as judges in these courts, the formal qualifications and status of those who acted as jurors, and at what can be known from the surviving evidence about the characteristics of the litigants who sued or were sued in the London courts. The focus of chapter 7 is on the emergence in and after 1300, and subsequent development, of the city's main law officers (the Recorder, the Common Serjeant, and the Under-Sheriffs) and on the process by which the holders of these offices came to be professionals and the separate process by which these offices later came to be held by professional lawyers. Chapter 8 complements chapter 7 by looking more generally at the history of legal representation in the city in this period. Tucker argues strongly against the city authorities having exercised any control of legal representation between 1305 and 1518 and against any significant professionalization of representation before 1500.

The effectiveness of the city's legal procedures is assessed in chapter 9 by looking at the speed with which defendants were made to appear in court and the proportion of cases initiated that were resolved by judgment within the litigation process, at the special arrangements made to assist poorer litigants who might otherwise have been excluded from its courts, and at the enforcement of ethical standards on legal representatives, judges, and jurors. The short concluding chapter returns to the relationship between city custom and legal administration and the common law. Tucker notes how Chancery in the fifteenth century came increasingly to intervene in litigation in the city and King's Bench may also have begun to do so, thereby significantly diminishing the relative, but not absolute, autonomy the city's courts had hitherto enjoyed. Tucker also discusses the evidence for the possible influence of London's city courts and their practice not just on other English urban courts but also on developments in the common law courts, especially the development of a remedy for misfeasance in assumpsit, the use of English in pleading and the development of written pleadings. This is an important book, required reading not just for all those with an interest in later medieval London but also all those with an interest in English medieval legal history.