Law, or more specifically, legal argument, has always been about telling stories. To make your point and win your case, you recount the events that prompt you to bring your claim in such a way as to put the best face on your part in them. So does your opponent in his defense. As law gets more technical, the premium rises swiftly to hire professional story-tellers, lawyers, to translate your story into the form most acceptable to the courts your readers and listeners. Medieval legal systems recognize this truth in the words they use for the "statement of claim". It is in Old French a conte (Englished as "count" for the early Common Law), the same word used for fairy tales, and the thirteenth century jurist Philippe de Beaumanoir came from a family that had won renown for the way they told both sorts of tale. Old English talu carries the same double resonance. The whole terminology of plaint and pleading in the various legal languages of Western Christendom is shot through with indications of the rhetoric of oral story-telling.

But the story of legal story-telling is little told. Medieval legal historians have so far made little of this, despite at least one good example from a later period in Natalie Zemon Davis' Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987). One result is that in a hyper-critical field, the legal records themselves have not received the attention they require. The heavily studied English Common Law is one illustration. How free were the royal clerks who compiled the English plea rolls? Who told them which details to select and which to omit,? when to include a jury's "special" verdict and when to give merely a laconic one-sentence summary ("The jurors say that he disseized him thus.")? when to record probing questions from the bench? And so on. And what of the YearBooks, those quintessential insiders' accounts of legal pleading? They certainly look like verbatim accounts of actual in-court dialogue. But if they are, the cases they treat can only have lasted a few minutes at most, a massively unlikely possibility given the complexity of the technical argument between justice and pleader.

If one proceeds to survey the records of the learned laws, comparable questions emerge. The etymological history of their libelli may be long past in the high middle ages, but their drafting demanded careful accuracy and spawned a technical literature of its own. Even more interesting are papal decretals, the rescripts by which popes sent deserving cases back to their places for origin for determination on papal authority by Judges Delegate. These too told stories, often in the very partisan words the single protagonist who had purchased them at Rome. John Noonan's Power to Dissolve: Lawyers & Marriages in the Courts of the Roman Curia (1972) showed us how surprising and beautiful decretal stories could be. A multitude of equally intriguing tales remain to be told, as also the crucial one of exactly how decretals came to be written the way they were.

Retrieval of the life so carefully freeze-dried out of legal records may also open up routes to a deeper understanding of the narrative urge in the wider medieval culture. Law clerks themselves drew inspiration from the entertainment literature around them. On occasions when they were bored enough, caricatures (telling stories of Jewish villainy or trial by battle) and odd scraps of irreverent text (eg from a mid-thirteenth century eyre roll: "It's my little love affairs that keep me happy!") uncover their secret life of the soul. There was almost as much of a general market for legal tales in the middle ages as there is now. Chansons de geste, romances, the lais of Marie de France, fabliaux are only some of the genres enlivened by legal detail and narrative. Literary scholars have long brought to bear upon their texts advanced techniques of narrative analysis which have much to offer historical students of law and culture alike. What role does legal story-telling play in the context of medieval literature as a whole? What was the fascination of courtroom tales for the medieval audience? Was it merely human or in some way special to the medieval West? How and why do authors choose to resort to the Law in their writing? Do some genres favor this more than others? What degree (if any) of intertextuality was there between creative writers and the recorders of actual real-life litigation? The theory-inclined should be able to add important questions of their own to this brief list.

Lawyers too have their theory, and one current vogue has implications for historians and perhaps literary scholars too. For feminist legal scholars as for critical race theorists, "legal narratives" carry quite specific implications. They start from a healthy awareness of the way that Law almost always favors the haves over the have-nots, the powerful over the excluded. They focus on the hegemonial structures of legal doctrine and forms that drown the pleas of the oppressed, and conclude that there may be no way for them successfully to tell their true stories. The rules of evidence exclude the most telling facts. The definitions of crime set up the issues in sexist and establishment ways that rule out of court the genuine wrongs of raped women, the economically and racially disadvantaged. The only answer is to tell their tales nevertheless the way they would want it, irrespective of court rules or, if necessary, in open defiance of them.

This movement raises obvious problems for conservative and liberal alike and has in fact provoked fierce and bitter debate. Does it have lessons, one wonders, for those of us engaged in the study of law in that past culture of the West that generated, for example, those allegedly gender-biased Common-Law definitions of crime? Surely it does. But what? New readers could start with Kathryn Abrams, "Hearing the Call of Stories", 79 California Law Review (1991), 971 sq. or Patricia Williams, The Rooster's Egg (1995) and Peter Brooks & Paul Gewirtz eds., Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law (1996). And Janet Malcolm, The Crime of Sheila McGough (Knopf: New York, 1999) is a stunning reminder that simply telling the story in court is sometimes not enough to win the case and achieve merited justice!