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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The Michigan Law Review Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Michigan Law Review.Over the last decade historians of crime have reacted to the anecdotal impressionism of their predecessors by adopting a more systematic, statistical approach.' They seek a more comprehensive picture of the nature, incidence, and causes of crime by using "social research" -the umbrella term used to describe the concepts, methods, and techniques derived from the social sciences.2 Crime is no longer studied qualitatively and in isolation, but quantitatively and in a broad historical and social context so that patterns within the society and between societies can be observed. The historian of crime can no longer get by on high moral tone and a sharp eye for the titillating barbarities of a bygone age; he must be at once historian, criminologist, statistician, anthropologist, sociologist, and lawyer. The recent works of Professor Given (Society and Homicide inThirteenth-Century England) and Professor Hanawalt (Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348) extend the moder approach to the history of medieval crime in England. Both authors presume that the study of crime provides insights into social relationships: "The relationship between the two participants in the criminal drama tells much about crime and about social interactions in general"

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One of the major developments in the history of western Europe between 1100 and 1300 was the construction of large-scale political organizations. Before 1100 political life had often been intensely local, its horizons limited to the village, parish, or county. But in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the old local communities of post-Carolingian Europe were aggregated into the kingdoms and city-states that formed such a prominent feature of European life in the high Middle Ages. This essay is concerned with one aspect of this process of political construction: the factors that determined the possible pathways that a local community could follow as it was incorporated into a larger political organization.

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