Dr Laura Flannigan FRHistS

I grew up in the historic city of Lincoln, where I attended a local state school. I studied for my undergraduate degree in History at the University of York, and then stayed on for a Masters in Early Modern History. In 2017 I joined Newnham College, Cambridge, to study for a Ph.D. on justice in early Tudor England, which was completed in June 2020. I moved to Oxford to take up a post as Stipendiary Lecturer in History at Christ Church for the academic year 2020–21, before joining St John’s as a Junior Research Fellow in October 2021.

I am a historian of law and society in late-medieval and early modern England, between the fifteenth-century ‘Wars of the Roses’ and the civil wars of the 1640s. My Ph.D. work examined the principle and practice of royal justice in the early Tudor period through an analysis of the little-studied ‘Court of Requests’, a tribunal that allowed poorer people to petition the monarch about all kinds of interpersonal disputes, usually against wealthier and more powerful opponents.

In late 2023 this research was published as a monograph with Cambridge University Press, entitled 'Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547'. Based on a study of some 5,000 legal documents in the UK's National Archives, this book combines a detailed analysis of the inner workings of government with attention to the social demands that influenced the development of justice-giving at the centre of power. This has the potential to alter our perception of who had a hand in shaping Tudor England – besides the monarchs and ministers with whom we are most familiar.

Currently I am expanding this exploration of the early-modern boom in litigation from the bottom up by looking for encounters with law outside of formal legal records. In an age of legal pluralism but relatively limited literacy, who knew what about the law - its procedures and substance - and how? My postdoctoral work examines personal writings about law, in domestic archives and in commonplace books (or notebooks), where it becomes possible to glimpse the proactive acquisition of legal information by laypeople. Generally, I am interested in the scope and depth of legal literacy; in the 'power of petitioning' and its practicalities; and in the communication of governmental ideals between monarchy and public.

Teaching

For undergraduates at Prelims and Final Honours, I teach the outline papers on the History of the British Isles III, 1330–1550; History of the British Isles IV, 1500–1700; and European and World History III, 1400–1650. I also regularly teach Historiography and Disciplines of History (Arguments and Comparisons) and offer classes in study skills and essay-writing for new undergraduates. At postgraduate level I co-teach classes in Theories and Methods. For the 2024-25 academic year I will be teaching on the MSt in Literature and Arts, offering a paper on political thought in England from More to Hobbes.

I also supervise undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations; students interest in working on any aspect of law, politics and society c.1400–1700 are welcome to get in touch.

Awards and Distinctions

In summer 2020, my article on 'Delivering Royal Justice in Early Sixteenth-Century England', was awarded the Sir John Neale Prize in Early Modern History by the Institute of Historical Research and the Royal Historical Society. You can read the published version in Historical Research here:

I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. I serve on the advisory boards for the Fifteenth Century Society and the List and Index Society, and am a trustee for the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire.

Recent Publications

'Narrating Disputes: litigation and its retellings in fifteenth-century England', Continuity and Change (forthcoming)

Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, 1485–1547, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Hearings of the Court of Requests, 1493–1538 (TNA REQ 1), List and Index Society (2 vols., Kew: List and Index Society, 2023)

'New evidence of justice-giving by the early Tudor Council of the North, 1540–43', Northern History Journal 59:2 (2022)

'Signed, Stamped, and Sealed: Delivering Royal Justice in Early Sixteenth-Century England', Historical Research 94:264 (2021)

' "Allowable or Not"? John Stokesley, the Court of Requests, and Royal Justice in Sixteenth-Century England', Historical Research 93:262 (2020)

'Litigants in the English "Court of Poor Men's Causes", or Court of Requests, 1515–1525', Law and History Review 38:2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0738248019000440