The book is an analysis of the cultural and social functions of law, legal processes and legal rituals in late medieval Northern France.
It is centered around a time and a place in which European law underwent some major transformations, from a plethora of local oral customs to a fairly coherent system of national, written customary law. In this process, law and legal procedures came to reflect a great variety of cultural traditions, ranging from popular perceptions of animals and the human body to learned ideas of Roman jurisprudence.
Drawing upon wide-ranging sources: judicial, legal, literary and historical, Cohen analyzes the various influences upon the shaping of law as a cultural manifestation and its application as an actual system of justice.