One of the best ways we have of assessing what contemporaries expected of the law is to use the legal records to find out what the law actually did; and, on this basis, to try to ascertain what it was designed to achieve and how those affected by it responded. As part of the first process, we need to be clear about what we can expect medieval legal records to tell us. Some of us, of course, think we know the answer to that already. There is an understandable reluctance to tackle the records en masse, partly because of the enormous amount of work involved, and partly because of doubts about whether, given the nature of the medieval records themselves and their survival rates, they can be used to provide answers even to quite basic questions.

Consequently, historians have tended to use legal records either in an unsystematic way, or systematically, but selectively; and yet, in order to have a correct understanding of what was happening to medieval English law, we have no alternative but to consider that law as a whole. Although medieval England did not have a system of law courts, precisely, it certainly had a network of them. It also offered those who wanted to sue or prosecute others a number of different ways of skinning the cat. The aim of this paper is to highlight the pitfalls which await those who attempt to use the legal records piecemeal, and, more positively, to demonstrate that there are better ways of using them.

Before going any further, it is worth considering the sort of questions that historians pose when they wonder about expectations of the law in the Middle Ages. The first case-study to be examined here provides a good example of what the legal records can and cannot tell us in the current state of knowledge. It attempted and failed to determine the effect that a series of treason trials held in London in 1468 had on contemporary public opinion. These trials have attracted the attention of historians because they involved as one of the defendants a former London mayor, Sir Thomas Cook. As London's governors corporately supported a rebellion against the king a year later, it could well have been that this particular trial influenced their attitude then.

The conduct of the trials and surrounding events provoked considerable contemporary or near-contemporary comment, mostly critical.