At a time when the Battle of Hastings and Magna Carta have become common currency in political debate, this study of the role played by the Norman Conquest in English history between the eleventh and the seventeenth centuries is both timely and relevant.

This book represents the first full-length study of the English criminal trial in a crucial period of its development (1300-1550). Based on prime source material, The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England uses legal treatises, contemporary reports of instructive cases, chancery rolls, state papers and court files and rolls to reconstruct the criminal trial in the later medieval and early Tudor periods. There is particular emphasis on the accusation process (studied in depth here for the first time, showing how it was, in effect, a trial within a trial); the discovery of a veritable revolution in conviction rates between the early fifteenth century and the later sixteenth (why this revolution occurred is explained in detail); the nature and scope of the most prevalent types of felony in the period; and the startling contrast between the conviction rate and the frequency of actual punishment. The role of victims, witnesses, evidence, jurors, justices and investigative techniques are analysed. John Bellamy is one of the foremost scholars in the field of English criminal justice and in The Criminal Trial in Later Medieval England gives a masterful account of what the medieval legal process involved. He guides the reader carefully through the maze of disputed and controversial issues, and makes clear to the non-specialist why these disputes exist and what their importance is for a fuller understanding of medieval criminal law. Those with a special interest in medieval law, as well as all those interested in how society deals with crime, will appreciate Professor Bellamy's clarity and wisdom and his careful blend of critical overview and new insights.

"The study then considers the treatment of rape and ravishment in a range of literary genres: in hagiography, female saints are repeatedly threatened with rape; the stories of Lucretia and Helen underpin legendary history; the acts of rape and ravishment challenge and shape chivalric order in romance; otherworldly rapes result in the conception of romance heroes. The final two chapters examine the ways in which Malory and Chaucer write and rewrite rape and ravishment."--BOOK JACKET.

This book reassesses the unusually violent rule of Edward II and the Despensers between 1321 and 1326. It examines the social dislocation caused by Edward's execution of his opponents and the confiscation of their lands in 1322 and the perversion of the law which accompanied it. From an examination of a large amount of unpublished material, Mrs Fryde shows how an exceptionally grasping courtier, the younger Despenser, worked with an equally grasping king to produce for the one an enormously swollen landed estate and for the other a vast hoard of treasure. The new evidence brought to light suggests that it was greed for wealth rather than any spirit of innovation which brought the Exchequer reforms of these years. Queen Isabella's contribution to the king's overthrow and Edward's disastrous relations with her brother, the king of France, are worked out in detail and there is a separate chapter on the contribution of London to the downfall of the regime.

This book is a study of two important and related pieces of thirteenth-century English legislation - the Provisions of Westminster of 1259 and the Statute of Marlborough of 1267 - and is the first on any of the statutes of this period of major legislative change.