AALT Home
Attorneys in Early Modern England and Wales           Litigiousness in Early Modern England

Defendants in Common Pleas June 1607

The impact of the court of common pleas in the countryside was widespread and deep. The court of common pleas had by far the largest docket of the king's central courts. These maps graphically represent, county by county, the number of different people who were defendants at one point in time: June 1607.

The density of defendants in a particular county is only an indirect indication of litigiousness for several reasons. Defendants in most cases (replevin being the exception) were not the instigators of litigation. Moreover, without a good estimate of the population of the counties, one cannot be sure of the extent to which the density of defendants is the result of in-county litigious plaintiffs or a larger population--or temporary economic difficulties. The best deduction from the data thus is not itself statistical, but an appreciation of the degree to which most localities were aware of and caught up in the legal process emanating from Westminster.


Bedfordshire (comparatively averagely litigious)

Gloucestershire (comparatively extremely litigious)

Warwickshire (comparatively more litigious)

Wiltshire (comparatively averagely litigious)

Worcestershire (comparatively very litigious)

A combined map, somewhat condensed, of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, and Warwickshire demonstrates better that litigation levels were not uniform within the county. The area of heaviest litigation seems to have been in a swath through Bristol, Gloucester, and Worcester. Eastern Gloucestershire and eastern Worcestershire were fairly similar to Warwickshire. The implications of this remain to be ascertained. A first hypothesis, however, would have to be that the region around major urban areas functioned more deeply on credit because credit was more easily attainable. Whether this hypothesis will bear out depends largely on the residences of the creditor/plaintiffs, an area of detail more difficult to assess.