In the early 1950's, historians who studied
preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as
Europe in the period from roughly 1300 to 1800) began,
for the first time in large numbers, to investigate more
of the preindustrial European population than the 2 or 3
percent who comprised the political and social elite: the
kings, generals, judges, nobles, bishops, and local
magnates who had hitherto usually filled history books.
One difficulty, however, was that few of the remaining
97 percent recorded their thoughts or had them
chronicled by contemporaries. Faced with this situation,
many historians based their investigations on the only
records that seemed to exist: birth, marriage, and death
records. As a result, much of the early work on the
nonelite was aridly statistical in nature; reducing the
vast majority of the population to a set of numbers was
hardly more enlightening than ignoring them altogether.
Historians still did not know what these people thought
or felt.
One way out of this dilemma was to turn to the
records of legal courts, for here the voices of the
nonelite can most often be heard, as witnesses, plaintiffs,
and defendants. These documents have acted as "a point
of entry into the mental world of the poor." Historians
such as Le Roy Ladurie have used the documents to
extract case histories, which have illuminated the
attitudes of different social groups (these attitudes
include, but are not confined to, attitudes toward crime
and the law) and have revealed how the authorities
administered justice. It has been societies that have had
a developed police system and practiced Roman law,
with its written depositions, whose court records have
yielded the most data to historians. In Anglo-Saxon
countries hardly any of these benefits obtain, but it has
still been possible to glean information from the study
of legal documents.
The extraction of case histories is not, however, the
only use to which court records may be put. Historians
who study preindustrial Europe have used the records to
establish a series of categories of crime and to quantify
indictments that were issued over a given number of
years. This use of the records does yield some
information about the nonelite, but this information
gives us little insight into the mental lives of the
nonelite. We also know that the number of indictments
in preindustrial Europe bears little relation to the
number of actual criminal acts, and we strongly suspect
that the relationship has varied widely over time. In
addition, aggregate population estimates are very
shaky, which makes it difficult for historians to
compare rates of crime per thousand in one decade of
the preindustrial period with rates in another decade.
Given these inadequacies, it is clear why the case
history use of court records is to be preferred.