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.

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.

How law and governance operated in medieval England - and whether contemporaries saw justice in its operations - have long generated scholarly discussions. 13 scholars, established and younger figures, historians and literary analysts, offer their new views in this volume.

This is the first work devoted to setting the legal system of the early 15th century in its social and political context. Rejecting the traditional view of late medieval England as chronically lawless and violent, Powell emphasizes instead the structural constraints on royal power to enforce the law, and the king's dependence on the cooperation of local society for keeping the peace.

Several ofthe themes of this study have been treated in earlier publica tions, some by means of a general analysis and some through a detailed handling of problems raised by a particular theme or historian. Both the more general theoretical treatment of the theme and the concrete historiographical treatment are, I think, indispensable aids to the proper understanding of the development of historical scholarship in nineteenth-and twentieth-century England. There are a number of problems in a concrete historiographical approach: there is first the mass of historians to be faced, and then the immense amount of historical themes dealt with in various periods. As a guideline through the tangle of themes we chose the historiography on the development of the English parliament. We can only hope that we have made a responsible choice of the historians concerned. Un fortunately it was not always possible for us to give extensive biogra phies of some of the more recent historians, as several 'papers' are still firmly in the possession of families, and a number of them mus- despite of years - still be labelled 'confidential.' The Pollard Papers in the London Institute of Historical Research thus remained inaccessible. Fortunately the lack was partly compen sated by some important material being found apart from these Papers.