Court-day crowds in colonial Virginia

Turk McCleskey and James C. Squire

Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 2016, vol. 49, issue 2, 92-100

Abstract: For a generation, legal historians investigating colonial Virginia have emphasized the dramaturgy of court day. According to the dramaturgical school of interpretation, administrative and judicial activities of county court officials amounted to theatrical performances that simultaneously enforced economic order and stabilized traditional social relationships. Such interpretations assume a large audience routinely attended county courts to observe legal dramas. Often, however, only a small number of persons can be documented as present during court day. The independence theorem from probability theory suggests that the number of documentable attendees is a useful and easily calculated estimate for actual total crowd size. If so, some Virginia court sessions were attended by hundreds of people, while others drew only a few participants. A variety of factors apparently inhibited court attendance in older Virginia counties. By contrast, in newer frontier counties, mid-eighteenth-century revisions of court calendars produced heavy attendance at court day. Regardless of the number of people in attendance, any Virginia county court could still effectively enforce credit contracts.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01615440.2015.1083409 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:vhimxx:v:49:y:2016:i:2:p:92-100

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/vhim20

DOI: 10.1080/01615440.2015.1083409

Access Statistics for this article

Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History is currently edited by J. David Hacker and Kenneth Sylvester

More articles in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().