Anthony Musson's explicit aim is to develop a way in the intellectual history of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, in that he is concerned by the psychological attitudes of people towards the (empirical and conceptual) object 'law'. He claims also his choice for the methods of 'new legal history', and he provides a sound essay in this interdisciplinary direction. His work is a matter of interest not only for medieval and social historians in general, but it is also a very important contribution towards a new approach increasing the classic paths to understanding political and legal phenomena, and finally a very sound suggestion to historians of political thought and the historians of legal thought. The proper object of this book, 'legal consciousness', is the trait d'union between the practical sphere of normative action and the conceptual sphere of the justification of the deontic speech associated to this sphere -- for example, p. 124, "experience of the legal culture and of the particular fora...was thus a key factor in the growth of the legal consciousness of the general populace." In one meaning, it is a way to try to offer some ideas about a very fundamental question concerning every political and legal system, i.e. the question of political obligation: I read in this way the proposal of definition offered by Musson at p. 9, "legal consciousness [is] a complex phenomenon enabling people to reformulate their ideas and general opinions on the basis of their existing experiences and in accord with new legal opportunities." Finally, some good reasons to obey (or not obey) one legal system.
Musson offers us an historical analysis, centring the subject in two centuries and one country -- medieval England -- useful for every researcher interested in that period. But I suspect it is also a vigorous instrument to associate to the philosophical analysis à la Simmons (A. John Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations [Princeton, 1979]), as worthy of producing a new analysis about the notion of legal consciousness as Michael Walzer gave his historical-theoretical analysis of the notion of just war. Musson stresses that law in some form or other touched the lives of the entire population of medieval England, and this is true, I believe, for every country at every age. Musson refuses a purely formal approach to the object 'law', and he verifies the concrete efficacy of one legal system to achieve at least one of its purposes, i.e. to became an integral part of the way in which social relations are actually lived out and experienced (I may suggest, offering a set of norms explicitly exhibiting this purposes, looking at the canonical medieval legislation concerning Jews, but every set of norms supports this purpose).
The elements of Musson's historical thesis are the evolution from King John's encounter with the leading barons and knights questioning royal government to King Richard II's encounter with the Peasant's Revolt over a century and a half later. In this evolution, the norms of Magna Charta are building a new symbolic strength in the justification of political and social claims: to support these claims, a distinctive legal profession is born, associated to a specific emphasis in participatory role of particular communities. A specific feature of this profession as social group is that they regarded conformity to a code of ethics as a necessary corollary to legal status. Lawyers, jurists and judges appeared to be the 'priests' of the law: sometimes they really were priests (but laicisation is a key feature in royal justice at the beginning of fourteenth century), but they were always the guardians and the interpreters of the object 'law'. Law is a quasi-religious matter: somebody can say also that if law is not religious in an institutional meaning (this may be true only for canon law), medieval law is religious in an anthropological meaning, in that medieval world is permeated by an anthropological religious set of reference values (so, by using Levi Strauss' dichotomy, there is not only a savant speech about natural law; 'natural justice' is 'true justice' in that it is available in the natural world of greenwood [21], a sound reference to the anthropological sphere of sauvage religious experience).
A central point is an attentive identification of the sources of ideologies of law: they could stem from fragments of a legal act and from judicial pronouncements, more generally from legal speech; they could be the issue of the combination of different ideological streams (as Harold Berman stressed in Law and Revolution [1983], in Middle Ages, theology is law, and law is theology, at least in a dialectical tension). Ideology is partly a matter of personal beliefs, but it is also a matter of collective beliefs, in that they are the symbolical references of a community: the medieval world is a world of a great number of communities, and every individual may belong, in some respect, to more than one community. By analysing the different legal systems present at the same time (common law, canon law, customary law, and some other sets of norms), the author rightly states that the ecclesiastical and secular spheres proved to be permeable in a number of ways: I may add that the dialectical tension between theologians-jurists and jurists-theologians is confirmed by Musson in a dialectical exchange of concrete actions and claims about state of affairs in everyday life. Musson stresses also the crucial importance of extra-judicial instruments to set litigation (arbitrations, informal pressures, the interface zone of 'misrule'), claiming that judicial apparatus and extra-judicial methods are mutually compatible.
Musson offers an interesting description of the notion of accessibility, an idea expressing the availability by the legal system itself of the money for the individual plaintiff to support the judicial procedure in his steps. The frequency of the court sessions was increasing over thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rendering royal justice more present and efficient by a lot of remedies and means of initiating suits. Justice, as a system of rules and as an implementation of fairness, was assured by giving to all the classes of people the aids necessary to support the costs of procedure. Economic grounds were considered an unjustified basis on which to deny an opportunity for justice to poor people.
The role of parliament and the politicisation of law are the topic of the two last chapters of the book, in that they are the most explicit analyses of the role of ideology in the law: the burning of documents during the Peasant's Revolt shows an appreciation by the populace of the prevailing symbolism of legal speech. So Tyler, one of the chiefs of the revolt, is said to have asserted that once all men of law were dead "all things would be regulated by the decrees of the common people (249). It is not an appeal to new legislation, but to the enactment of the old legislation, for example to the traditional forms of community policing enrolled and symbolised by a new attitude of central government. Domesday Book is the symbolic reference for the peasants in revolt: Musson says it is the Magna Charta effect, i.e. the appropriation of widely revered legal documents as symbolic of fundamental law.
The medieval appeal to 'ancient' law as a justificatory strategy directed to assure the idea of a legal continuity against the variability and heterogeneity of statutory law (the law of the prince, of the contingent lawgiver) is really interesting. The matter is not the reality of this legal continuity, the matter is the rhetorical usage of this legal continuity to strengthen claims against dominant powers ('novel ley'). So it is possible to understand the passive resistance of peasants: normally, they refuse any form of active resistance (the Robin Hood of fourteenth-century ballads doesn't know the happy end of Walter Scott's novel; he is without hope, he finally dies; his curse is perhaps the only active resistance, this is the revenge of God for the poor against tyranny). In particular, they never oppose the King and their claims are always limited to the community itself. Royal propaganda was successful in putting across the king's role as head of the judicial system and ultimate earthly arbiter. A peasant rebel believed he could circumvent the legal system looking to the King as dispensing justice personally (expectations expressed also in the outlaw ballads). So we encounter the deliberate accumulation of retards in the payments of tax; to add another example to the rich material offered by Musson, this is the case of the trade corporation of wine growers in Auxerre -- a strong corporation, assisted by a group of lawyers, has the possibility of supporting a process during many years, employing a force of pressure by appealing to coutume in face of courts. And in 1377, forty villages in southern England refused to pay the lordship, by the appeal to their apparition in the Domesday book (252). In this sense, 'ancient ley' from 1086 declares them free villages of king's domain. They received a copy of the passages concerning them, and a part of them, half, can receive total satisfaction from the King's Bench (Colette Beaune, "Les monarchies médiévales, ch. 5: La communauté", in Yves-Marie Bercé, ed., Les monarchies [Paris 1997]).