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Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England is calculated to start a new round in the endless dialogue among historians. Private vengeance, and specifically the feud, Paul R. Hyams argues, was as much in vogue in early medieval England as it was on the Continent. Not only that, it continued to be the way that medieval English men and women often preferred to redress their wrongs, not only in the decades that followed the Norman conquest, but right up to the reign of Edward I, more than a century after English common law had begun to provide alternative means to settle disputes. Legal historians, Hyams insists, need to pay more attention than they have usually done to the choices that law's consumers make when they seek satisfaction for the wrongs they have suffered. In a book filled with learning and shrewd observations, Hyams offers historians a provocative new construction of the early history of the common law. -James A. Brundage, Ahmanson-Murphy Professor Emeritus, The University of Kansas

Paul R. Hyams engages in some feuds of his own in this consistently informative, learned, and imaginative account of feud's stubborn refusal to take its leave from the legal and political stage from the 9th to the 13th century, though it was invited (ambivalently) by king and cleric to vacate the scene. -William Ian Miller, University of Michigan Law School Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England is calculated to start a new round in the endless dialogue among historians. Private vengeance, and specifically the feud, Paul R. Hyams argues, was as much in vogue in early medieval England as it was on the Continent. Not only that, it continued to be the way that medieval English men and women often preferred to redress their wrongs, not only in the decades that followed the Norman conquest, but right up to the reign of Edward I, more than a century after English common law had begun to provide alternative means to settle disputes. Legal historians, Hyams insists, need to pay more attention than they have usually done to the choices that law's consumers make when they seek satisfaction for the wrongs they have suffered. In a book filled with learning and shrewd observations, Hyams offers historians a provocative new construction of the early history of the common law. -James A. Brundage, Ahmanson-Murphy Professor Emeritus, The University of Kansas

""Paul R. Hyams engages in some feuds of his own in this consistently informative, learned, and imaginative account of feud's stubborn refusal to take its leave from the legal and political stage from the 9th to the 13th century, though it was invited (ambivalently) by king and cleric to vacate the scene.""-William Ian Miller, University of Michigan Law School ""Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England is calculated to start a new round in the endless dialogue among historians. Private vengeance, and specifically the feud, Paul R. Hyams argues, was as much in vogue in early medieval England as it was on the Continent. Not only that, it continued to be the way that medieval English men and women often preferred to redress their wrongs, not only in the decades that followed the Norman conquest, but right up to the reign of Edward I, more than a century after English common law had begun to provide alternative means to settle disputes. Legal historians, Hyams insists, need to pay more attention than they have usually done to the choices that law's consumers make when they seek satisfaction for the wrongs they have suffered. In a book filled with learning and shrewd observations, Hyams offers historians a provocative new construction of the early history of the common law.""-James A. Brundage, Ahmanson-Murphy Professor Emeritus, The University of Kansas

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Paul R. Hyams is Director of the Medieval Studies Program and Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of King, Lords, and Peasants in Medieval England: The Common Law of Villeinage in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.

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