Custom, Identity and Resistance: English Free Miners and Their Law c. 1550–1800

Abstract

Recent historical interpretations of the role played by the law in early modern English society have tended to emphasise its incorporative and consensual nature. While some historians have chosen to stress the hegemonic qualities of the law, whereby the ruled were reconciled to their station through a legalistic and libertarian discourse which emphasised the inalienable ‘rights of the freeborn Englishman’, while actually operating in the interests of a ruling class, 1 in more recent interpretations the law has been seen to stand outside society and class relations, as a neutral arbitrating force. 2 In its practical operation, the criminal law has been seen as a force for social harmony and consensus in a society undergoing rapid structural change. 3 Access to legal redress, it has been argued, was available to all inhabitants of early modern society, while litigation allowed for an equality between rich and poor before the law.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.