Debate: Fiction in the archives: the York cause papers as a source for later medieval social history

In a recent article Frederik Pedersen used the records of matrimonial litigation from the York consistory, the principal Church court of the province, during the fourteenth century to make a number of observations concerning the relationship of these records to the society from which they were generated. He argued that ‘the medieval court documents do not present a random sample illustrating trends in the surrounding society’ and that litigants tended to be disproportionately drawn on the one hand from the upper echelons of society and on the other hand from locations close to York itself. He has further suggested that the age structures of male and female deponents found within the surviving cause papers do not fit the same model life tables and that this raises ‘further doubts about the representativeness of court documents as evidence of changing patterns of lay behaviour’. In this article, I shall show that his analysis is based upon a flawed methodology, is marred by error, and is ultimately mistaken. Pedersen's essential point in ‘Demography in the archives’, as outlined in the Abstract to the article, is that the people who appear in the court records are unrepresentative of society as a whole, and hence ‘that the court records tell us more about the people who used the courts than about trends in the society in which litigation arose’. My argument is that it is the very unrepresentativeness of the people and their cases that provides us with a window into the society from which the cases arise. I shall suggest ways in which the York cause paper evidence can indeed be used to illuminate broader social trends, but also suggest caveats as to the reading of individual causes.