Water resources were central to England's precocious economic development in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and then again in the industrial, transport, and urban revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of these periods saw a great deal of legal conflict over water rights, often between domestic, agricultural, and manufacturing interests competing for access to flowing water. From 1750 the common-law courts developed a large but unstable body of legal doctrine, specifying strong property rights in flowing water attached to riparian possession, and also limited rights to surface and underground waters. The new water doctrines were built from older concepts of common goods and the natural rights of ownership, deriving from Roman and Civilian law, together with the English sources of Bracton and Blackstone. Water law is one of the most Romanesque parts of English law, demonstrating the extent to which Common and Civilian law have commingled. Water law stands as a refutation of the still-common belief that English and European law parted ways irreversibly in the twelfth century. Getzler also describes the economic as well as the legal history of water use from early times, and examines the classical problem of the relationship between law and economic development. He suggests that water law was shaped both by the impact of technological innovations and by economic ideology, but above all by legalism.

Historians of medieval and Renaissance Italy have long held that the Florentine republic fell victim to rule by oligarchy in the early fifteenth century. Now, in the first complete analysis of the criminal law system of Florence during this crucial period, Laura Ikins Stern argues that the vitality of Florentine legal institutions gives evidence of a centralized state bureaucracy strong enough to thwart the early development of a ruling oligarchy. Exploring the changing roles played by judicial officials as well as the evolution of Florentine government, Stern shows how these developments reflected broad-based change in society at large. From such primary documents as legal statutes and actual trial records, she provides a step-by-step explanation of trial procedure to offer a rare glimpse of inquisition methods in the secular world--from public fame initiation, through the weighing of various levels of proof, to the complex process of sentencing. And sheexplores the links between implementation of inquisition procedure, the development of the territorial state, and the struggle between republican institutions and the emerging oligarchy. The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science.

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants' spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.