Law and Disorder in Early Modern Wales: Crime and Authority in the Denbeighshire Courts, c. 1660-1730 »

Sharon Howard is based at the Department of History and Welsh History at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

The sheer scale of surviving early modern Welsh court archives attests to the importance of the institutions that produces them—and they have, since the early 1970s, become major sources for a wide range of early modernists, not just those who specialize in criminal procedure. This volume discusses the fundamental and fascinating paradox of the criminal records of the Denbeighshire courts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, demonstrating their potential to illuminate both order and disorder, law-keepers and law-breakers, and the respectable and the unruly—showcasing early modern authority as both powerful and precarious in light of the shared experiences and attitudes of its local communities.

 

Editors' Foreword     v
Acknowledgements     ix
List of Tables     xiii
List of figures and maps     xv
Abbreviations     xvii
Note on conventions and Welsh names     xix
Glossary of selected legal terms     xxi
Introduction     1
English law and Welsh courts in a border county     30
Violence and its social contexts     52
Investigating theft     97
Contesting authority: governance, politics and religion     142
Contentious neighbours and local disputes     187
Experiences of authority at the margins of society     221
Conclusion     254
Bibliography     264
Index     285