No Law for the Poor: Book Launch Announcement

Written by Simon Williams

A new book by historian and writer Simon A. Williams argues that the medieval legal system in England and Wales was not a flawed or undeveloped attempt at justice: it was a sophisticated mechanism of control, designed from the outset to serve those who already held power.

No Law for the Poor: Justice and Power in Medieval England and Wales traces more than five centuries of crime, punishment and legal authority, from Anglo-Saxon wergild and the Danelaw through to the Norman Conquest, Forest Law, and the destruction of Welsh legal tradition under Edward I. At every turn, it asks not how the law worked, but who it worked for.

The book examines how women, villeins, Jews and the Welsh were systematically marginalised by a legal order that was neither crude nor accidental. Magna Carta, so often celebrated as a founding moment of English liberty, left roughly half the population entirely untouched.

No Law for the Poor is Williams's third book and forms part of a wider body of work examining law, power and ordinary lives in medieval Britain.

The book is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.

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