The history of criminal justice in the later Middle Ages is important for (at least) two reasons. First, because official justice was present across many areas of life – a major component in the power of states and ruling classes, a significant presence in cities (lawyers, police, court officials, public punishments), a source of material for fiction-writers and painters – and this makes it vital for a wider understanding of the period. Secondly, because of the range of social situations and problems that judicial records give us access to: not just the everyday conflict of insult and injury, but also the oppression of ethnic minorities (Jews, slaves), the frequency of domestic violence, the oppression of servants in urban households, the criminal responsibility of children and the insane, as well as the more colourful cases of skilful thieves, sacrilegious sex and inventive tricksters. The combination of the exotic and the quotidian in one source is hard to resist.

The last three or four decades of the twentieth century saw a great increase of interest among historians across Europe in issues of crime and criminal justice. In general terms, the motivation for this came first from ‘history from below’ and the unrivalled access to lower-class experience that judicial archives afforded. A secondary impulse lay in the developing history of the state and its institutions of repression.