Laura Flannigan's new book 'Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth' has been shortlisted for the RHS First Book Award
Dr Laura Flannigan has been nominated for The Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize 2025 for her book 'Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth'. This prize recognises the scholarly contribution and quality of history monographs published in 2024.
About Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth
The dawn of the Tudor regime is one of most recognisable periods of English history. Yet the focus on its monarchs' private lives and ministers' constitutional reforms creates the impression that this age's major developments were isolated to halls of power, far removed from the wider populace. This book presents a more holistic vision of politics and society in late medieval and early modern England. Delving into the rich but little-studied archive of the royal Court of Requests, it reconstructs collaborations between sovereigns and subjects on the formulation of an important governmental ideal: justice. Examining the institutional and social dimensions of this point of contact, this study places ordinary people, their knowledge and demands at the heart of a judicial revolution unfolding within the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Yet it also demonstrates that directing extraordinary royal justice into ordinary procedures created as many problems as it solved.
About the Author
Dr Laura Flannigan is a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, having completed her degrees at the universities of York and Cambridge. She specialises in late medieval and early modern England, and is particularly interested in how wider society interacted with a growing legal system. Her doctoral project examined the records of one Crown court, the Court of Requests, to understand how early Tudor kings used justice as a means of governing their subjects - and how those subjects could benefit from royal rule. This was published as Royal Justice and the Making of the Tudor Commonwealth, as well as in articles for Law and History Review, Historical Research (a piece awarded the Sir John Neale Prize in Early Modern History in 2020), and Northern History. Laura's latest research seeks to understand how, and how much, ordinary people knew about law in early modernity. In August this year she will join The Ohio State University as the Warner Woodring Chair in British History.
