The official archive of the UK government. Our vision is to lead and transform information management, guarantee the survival of today's information for tomorrow and bring history to life for everyone...

On 16 December 1773, American colonists threw 340 chests of tea into Boston harbour in an event now known as the Boston Tea Party. This letter from the East India Company gives a breakdown of teas des...

Hear the shocking tale of the plot to kill Elizabeth I from historian and broadcaster Tracy Borman.

A nationwide survey commissioned by Henry VIII on the property and wealth of 16th century England and Wales is to be made publicly accessible for the first time. The survey, known as the Valor Ecclesi...

Hear the shocking tale of the plot to kill Elizabeth I from historian and broadcaster Tracy Borman.

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New online from Law and History Review: Fines and the Common Bench, 1218–1226 by Douglas R. Chapman, University of Cambridge: The years immediately following the issue of Magna Carta and the death of John were of fundamental importance in determining the trajectory of the nascent common law legal system. Although the existence of the Bench had functionally been permanently established under chapter seventeen of Magna Carta, the central royal court faced an uncertain future under conciliar rule and in the aftermath of extensive civil conflict. The extensive extant records of the common law fines made to initiate actions in the Bench as recorded the Fine Rolls offer a window into the roles played by the court in relation to litigants, within the wider structure of royal governance, and in relation to a rapidly evolving legal system. An analysis of these sources can therefore both illuminate the early workings of the common law legal procedures and characterize the demand for royal justice that survived the First Barons’ War before continuing to grow across the thirteenth century. What emerges is a picture of a judicial system at the onset of a period of rapid development and widespread demand that would come to lay the foundation for the massive expansion of royal justice that was to follow throughout the reign of Henry III and beyond. --Dan Ernst 

The official archive of the UK government. Our vision is to lead and transform information management, guarantee the survival of today's information for tomorrow and bring history to life for everyone...

In recent decades, some justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have questioned the broad definition of liberty that is the basis for the doctrine of substantive due

The ASLH is pleased to announce the extension of the deadline for Projects and Proposals funding until 9/18. The goal of P&P is the "funding of new initiatives in the study, presentation, and producti...

This collection of essays presents recent research on the Inns of Court and their place in the literary and cultural spaces of the early modern world.

By Cassie Watson; posted 28 March 2021. Our ability to research the history of crime is expanding at a remarkable rate, as more and more legal documents and historic newspapers are digitised. Despi…