Publications
Recusants, 1641, by Cynthia Herrup, published June 1978 in Sussex Family Historian (vol. 3 no. 5, article, pp.142-144) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 7967] & The Keep [LIB/501255] & CD SFH40 from S.F.H.G.
Preview:Church wardens and constables reported those who refused to participate in Church of England public rites. This article lists the recusants by parish.
The Common Peace: Legal structure and legal substance in East Sussex, 1594-1640, by Cynthia B. Herrup, 1982 at Northwestern University, Illinois (Ph.D. thesis)
New Shoes and Mutton Pies: Investigative Responses to Theft in Seventeenth-Century East Sussex, by Cynthia Herrup, published December 1984 in The Historical Journal (vol. 27, no. 4, article, p.811, ISSN: 0018-246X) View Online
Abstract:On May Day 1639, Christopher Deering discovered that a lamb was missing from his property in Heathfield, East Sussex. The most accessible criminal court to try such a theft was the quarter sessions, which met approximately two months later. By the court date, Robert Walcott, a local labourer, had confessed to the felony. In court, Walcott again acknowledged his complicity. Pleading benefit of clergy, he asked the justices to spare his life. Walcott read a biblical text well enough to pass the traditional - although long outdated - literacy test of clerical status. He was branded in the thumb to mark him as an excused felon, and dismissed from public custody.
The Common Peace: Legal Structure and Legal Substance in East Sussex 1594-1640, by Cynthia B. Herrup, published c.1989 accessible at: The Keep [LIB/502083]
The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England, by Cynthia B. Herrup, published 25 August 1989 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History, 252 pp., Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521375878 & ISBN-13: 9780521375870) accessible at: The Keep [LIB/502180]
Abstract:The Common Peace traces the attitudes behind the enforcement of the criminal law in early modern England. Focusing on five stages in prosecution (arrest, bail, indictment, conviction and sentencing), the book uses a variety of types of sources - court records, biographical information, state papers, legal commentaries, popular and didactic literature - to reconstruct who actually enforced the criminal law and what values they brought to its enforcement. A close study of the courts in eastern Sussex between 1592 and 1640 allows Dr Herrup to show that an amorphous collection of modest property holders participated actively in the legal process. These yeomen and husbandmen who appeared as victims, constables, witnesses and jurors were as important to the credibility of the law as were the justices and judges. The uses of the law embodied the ideas of these middling men about not only law and order but also religion and good government. By arguing that legal administration was part of the routine agenda of obligation for middling property holders, Dr Herrup shows how the expectations produced by legal activities are important for understanding the decades immediately before the outbreak of the English Civil War. As the first book to use early seventeenth-century legal records outside of Essex, The Common Peace adopts an explicitly comparative framework, attempting to trace the ways that social conditions influenced legal process as well as law enforcement in various counties. By blending social history, legal history and political history, this volume offers a complement to more conventional studies of legal records and of local government.