Kent at Law, 1602 - v.1 : The County Jurisdiction

This is the first volume in a major series which provides a living, records-based portrait of litigation in early modern English society.

The project covers all legal records, local and central, secular and ecclesiastical, concerning any dispute which took place in Kent in the year 1602.

This volume includes the gaol calendars, jury panels, and criminal indictments of the assizes, together with the commissions, county and hundred rolls, minute books, gaol calendars, jury lists and panels, indictments, inquisitions, depositions, recognizances, and correspondence of the justices of the peace in quarter and special sessions.

The JP records, which supplement at times the records of the criminal assizes, reveal a wide range of criminal prosecutions, regulatory offences, and customary obligations.

The records of these county-wide jurisdictions are especially rich in quantity and substance at the turn of the century.

They reveal a coterie of JPs knowledgeable and practised in the law who provided a working quorum to administer justice in the two administrative divisions centred at Canterbury and Maidstone. The pattern of prosecutions which emerges shows the extent to which the property and commercial interests of the county squirearchy are evidenced in the activities of the JPs of particular demographic areas of the county.

It also demonstrates the critical importance of local records to the history of crime and criminal justice in the early modern era.