Keeping the Peace in Medieval Suffolk, by Nicholas R. Amor

Abstract

This handsome, well-illustrated volume consists largely of an analysis of the records relating to Suffolk in the National Archives/Public Record Office of three courts. These are the Gaol Delivery Rolls and files (for the years 1308–16), the Coroners’ Rolls (1351–64) and the Peace Rolls (1361–4). The analysis is prefaced by both a case-study and a description of the hierarchy of courts in the county in the period under examination. The case-study is of the life of Bartholomew Gerard of Fakenham, a reasonably prosperous freeholder in the early fourteenth century, and of his involvement with public order at a time of social and economic tumult. This leads to one of the author’s main purposes in writing the book, namely to delineate the roles of the gentry, especially as justices of the peace (JPs), and the upper peasantry, as jurors, in local law enforcement on behalf of the Crown. The other themes consist of, first, an attempt to demonstrate that the crime rate in medieval Suffolk was much lower than records such as parliamentary statutes and petitions would have us believe. The second is an examination of the effects on the county of two natural disasters in this period, namely the great famine of 1315 to 1317, the Black Death of the mid-century and later, plus the human-made disaster of the Hundred Years War with France.