This book is about trials, civil and criminal, ecclesiastical and secular, in England and Europe between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The opening chapter provides a conceptual framework both for this book and for its companion volume on the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Subsequent chapters provide a rounded view of trials conducted according to different procedures within contrasting legal systems, including English common law and Roman canon law. They consider the judges and juries and the amateur and professional advisers involved in legal processes as...