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At the margins of the history of English law: the institutional, the socio-political and the ‘blotted-out’

So much of what, so far, has constituted the grammar of mainstream historical discourse on English law can be broadly characterised as being primarily concerned with either formal legal institutions or their socio-political context. While such histories are generally useful, they fail to see what other-histories – what radically different stories – could be told instead. Such a web of other-histories, it is here suggested, require both time and imagination. By temporarily leaving mainstream historical accounts and entering into the time of legal history the centrality of so many institutional and socio-political histories of English law may have to be reconsidered. In particular, what would become clear is that one type of legal history needs urgently to be told – a history of the ‘blotted-out’. Neither included in mainstream legal history, nor excluded from it – neither visible nor memorable – the history of the blotted-out is the history of what can be found, so commonly and ordinarily, in everyday life. Mainstream legal history is either unaware of, or uninterested in, the blotted-out. Yet, it is precisely a history of the blotted-out which, importantly, would guard, in history, the possibility of law's most original imagination.