ABSTRACT

The subject of custom has rarely been as popular among historians of early modern England as it is today. Custom, that is, in the sense of social practice: the festivals, feast days, charivaris, traditional songs and other communal activities that now extend to include such a range of human action, that the convenient hold-all label “popular culture”can no longer adequately contain it. Customary law, the law of the manor which so interested R.H. Tawney, and which is attracting renewed interest among

eighteenth-century historians like E.P.Thompson, attracts considerably less attention nowadays from social historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 This neglect is due in part to the unforgiving nature of the sources. As F.W.Maitland observed a hundred years ago, court rolls “are taciturn, they do not easily yield up their testimony”.3 However, it also reflects the tendency of many social and legal historians to consider customary law as being in decline by the sixteenth century, and, like Lord Denning, to regard it as being immemorial-to see customary law as backward looking and inflexible, a rigid maintainer of continuities that was becoming increasingly out of place in an age of legal centralization and growing change.4