The period from 1294 to 1350 witnessed the final phase of the Angevin administrative advances in England, and was crucial in determining the shape and principal features of England's new judicial system. This study challenges the received orthodoxy on judicial development in the first half of the 14th century. It concentrates on the personnel of local justice and the wider administrative context to build up a composite picture of attitudes to public order and law enforcement through a systematic examination of the surviving legal records.

This study of Edward I's governance radically re-evaluates his motivations and achievements, presenting an entirely new interpretation of his reign.

This book breaks new ground in the study of crime and law enforcement in late medieval England using the reign of Henry V as a detailed case study. Dr Powell considers the subject on three levels: legal theory - academic, governmental, and popular thinking about the nature of law; legal machinery - the framework of courts and their procedures; and legal practice - the enforcement of the law in the reign of Henry V. There exists at present no other work devoted to setting the legal system of this period in its social and political context. Rejecting the traditional view of late medieval England as chronically lawless and violent, Dr Powell emphasizes instead the structural constraints on royal power to enforce the law, and the King's dependence on the co-operation of local society for the maintenance of his peace. Public order relied less on the coercive powers of the courts than the art of political management and the use of procedures for conciliation and arbitration at local level.

Anthropological archaeology and other disciplines concerned with the formation of early complex societies are undergoing a theoretical shift. Given the need for new directions in theory, the book proposes that anthropologists look to political science, especially the rational choice theory of collective action. The authors subject collective action theory to a methodologically rigorous evaluation using systematic cross-cultural analysis based on a world-wide sample of societies.