ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on what was perceived to happen in late medieval England when the centripetal power of the state met face to face, as it were, with the centrifugal traditions of the provinces. It aims to demonstrate that an oppositional relationship existed between the need of the state to impose centralised and standardised forms of legal procedure on the kingdom and the abiding determination of provincial elites to regulate their own affairs. The chapter argues that this opposition was articulated both in the operational rationale of criminal justice and in the imaginative literature of criminality and outlawry. The main interest here is with the way in which official rationalisations of the relative state of disorder in different parts of the country themselves interacted with traditions of regional identity that articulated a long-standing hostility to royal interventionism by celebrating the activities of 'local' criminals, outlaws and bandits.