The Database
The database for this article derives from common pleas attorney warrant rolls that are
available on the AALT site (attorney warrant rolls constitute the final membranes in any given
plea roll.) I took thorough notes on the Hilary, Easter, and Trinity term warrant rolls for 1348, so
that the count of lawyers functioning as attorneys in the court of common pleas and their relative
activity covers the January to June 1348 time period. I added to that number information taken
from the Michaelmas 1348 roll (without changing the assessment of relative activity), but
allocated new attorney names from the South and West to new attorneys after the Black Death
and all others to pre-Black Death attorneys.
The appropriate time period for comparison with the time after the Black Death was a
problem. The amount of litigation was far less, and the attorney warrant rolls were thus much
shorter: the likelihood of an active attorney appearing in any given term was far lower than prior
to the Black Death. I settled for identifying the lawyers who appeared in the year and a half
beginning in Trinity 1350 and ending in Michaelmas 1351. In this post-Black Death part of the
database, I did not note frequency of appearance.
In both pre- and post-Black Death rolls, I tried to assess the county/counties of most
frequent activity. That assessment derived primarily from marginations. Since overt property
actions were relatively frequent at the time, marginations are better guides for attorney activity
than in the fifteenth century and after, but they are still somewhat problematic: personal actions
were already more frequent than property actions, and the marginations could thus mislead. In
this analysis, the only problem possible from misleading marginations would be in the allocation
of attorneys to pre- or post-Black Death categories from the Michaelmas 1348 roll, but the
numbers of new attorneys appearing in Michaelmas 1348 was small relative to the whole group
and only a few of those would be mis-allocated.
The database seems very reliable. I am tempted to check the pre-Black Death attorney
group by going through the Michaelmas 1347 roll. If I do, I will revise this article to include that
analysis, but the chance that that roll would produce any significant increase in the number of
pre-Black Death attorneys who continued to function after the Black Death seems slight.
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