The Legal Landscape

This chapter argues that law had a physical presence in the landscape of late-medieval England. Legal ideas did not consist merely in words and writings, but were constituted in their concrete manifestations in the material environment; this was the terrain upon which they were articulated, contested, and resolved. People whose lives were lived so close to the land understood its signification intuitively. They knew the places in which they dwelt and worked were replete with different legal claims, some so well established by generations of institutional or customary arrangements that they formed part of the architecture of the everyday, while others remained latent in the slowly changing land, ready to become problematic if a stream were diverted, or new buildings were constructed. The existence of such claims imbued everyday mobilities with legal significance: people had to watch their step, moving through the world in ways that accorded with some claims while contesting others—droving cattle through a particular field, moving a boundary stone to its ‘proper’ place, fishing at a certain point on the river—in a legal language that was broadly comprehensible. The late-medieval landscape represented a large surface on which non-elites could make their own legal inscriptions.