Just another day in Chancery Lane: disorder and the law in London's legal quarter in the fifteenth century

The legal quarter of late medieval London – the district outside the city’s western gates which included eleven Inns of Court and of Chancery and the royal courts at Westminster and in Chancery Lane – was a liminal area. Rather than being a peaceful and law-abiding district, as at least one fifteenth-century apologist would have it, it was the setting for periodic outbreaks of violence fomented to a high degree by the tribalism of the communities of the various law schools. Litigation in the royal courts added provincial rivalries and disputes and their protagonists to this already heady mix, making the space between Temple Bar and Westminster Hall one notable for its explosive potential for outbreaks of violence. Using a case study of an incident in the early 1450s that is unusually well-evidenced in the court records, and other sources, including the well-known correspondence of the East Anglian Paston family, and that drew over time drew in litigants, witnesses, lawyers and eventually a magnate and his affinity, the article explores the tensions inherent in London’s legal district and their interplay with disputes and law-breaking in the regions.