Sebastian Sobecki. Unwritten Verities

Historians with even half an interest in the English medieval or early modern common law will prick up their ears when they hear of a book about the “making of England’s vernacular legal culture,” even when they learn that the primary intended readership for the volume is scholars of late medieval English cultural, intellectual, and literary history. The subject is a good one, and in Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549, Sebastian Sobecki covers a number of interesting topics. Chapter 1 of Sobecki’s study provides a detailed and potentially useful synthesis of what is known of legal education in later medieval England both before and after the creation of the Inns of Court. But it is not an entirely reliable account. I can make no sense of Sobecki’s claim that “surviving manuscripts point to a tradition of learning exercises that anticipated the Inns of Court by at least two hundred years” (31), which would require there to have been learning exercises in English law in the mid-twelfth century. Nor, I think, would the unwary reader ever guess from Sobecki’s discussion and its emphasis on the primacy of the spoken and aural memory that a primary mode of self-education for law students in the later Middle Ages was the compiling of written reports of pleadings and judgments that they heard in court.

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