1. D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in D. Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), pp. 17–63.
2. J. H. Langbein, ‘Albion’s Fatal Flaws’, Past and Present, vol. 98 (1983), pp. 96–120.
3. C. B. Herrup, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987).
4. J. A. Sharpe, ‘The People and the Law’, in B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1985), pp. 244–70.
5. In this emphasis, Sharpe is far from alone. See also Langbein, ‘Albion’s Fatal Flaws’; Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’; A. Macfarlane, The Justice and the Mare’s Ale: Law and Disorder in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981); Herrup, Common Peace. While an extensive and sophisticated literature has been developed by early modern social historians concerning issues of criminality, litigation and the criminal law, the fissures, contradictions and conflicts within understandings of legality in the period have largely been evaded, and ‘the law’ treated as a given. For an exception, see