The texts of forty documents laying out rules governing the lives of local communities, the regulation of farming and the exploitation of natural resources in the six northern counties in Tudor and Stuart times.


This volume presents the texts of forty documents spelling out rules and regulations governing local communities in northern England in the late-medieval and early modern centuries. They have been chosen to illustrate the bylaws (or 'pains' as they were termed), laid down and policed by the manor courts and include both articles of enquiry, laying out the matters to be investigated by the courts, and 'pain lists', compilations of a manor's bylaws and the penalties incurred for breaking them. The bylaws formed a body of local law and custom which touched many aspects of daily life, from disorderly behaviour and the obligations owed to those in authority, to the regulation of open-field farming and the management of resources from common land. The documents in this volume derive from manors across the northern counties and include communities in a wide range of landscapes and environments, from open-field villages in the Yorkshire Wolds to hill farming hamlets deep in the Pennines and Lake District fells. They form an important source for the history of local societies, social control and agrarian regulation.