Includes bibliographical references and index.

"This book is about people's relationships with, to, and under the law in the past, and modern historians' understanding of the law as experienced by those people. With some zig-zaggery into the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is its time frame. The ziggy shape is history's shape, not history as 'the past', but history as stories that get told about the past. 'The law' here is English law-The Laws of England-with its common law system of precedent as opposed to written code; the common law's regime of adversarial procedure as opposed to the inquisitorial (or 'truth-finding') systems of Continental Europe. It is English law, with its overlapping circles of never-quite binaries: common law/statute law; criminal/ civil law; high law/low law; public law/private law; law/equity ... all of it but the very last 'the common law' in one way or another and designated incomprehensible by many commentators. It is an adversarial legal system of fairly recent origin: now-familiar lawyer-dominated procedures came into being over the century from about 1750.1 This is one of the reasons for some historians (not legal historians) having trouble with this law. Assured by great authorities like Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, that we are looking at an immemorial system, pertaining time out of mind, we have not known until very recently that writing in the 1760s, Blackstone was in fact describing a system in the making"--