Legal Pluralism, Arbitration, and State Formation: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Quaker Court, 1682–1772
Abstract
Legal centralization in British America was characterized by the passing of arbitration from the community level to the colonial courts. As a consequence, when the 1765 Stamp Act raised the cost of court business, colonists were at a loss for alternatives. This paper addresses the question of why, at this point, colonists did not return to earlier, non-state forms of arbitration. It offers an explanation by providing a detailed empirical study of an alternative American legal forum: the Philadelphia Quaker monthly meeting. While busy arbitrating disputes in the early colonial period, it declined from around 1720. Contrary to what might be expected, this decline was not the consequence of state efforts to marginalize competing institutions. Rather, the local Quaker population abandoned their community legal forum in favor of the public courts. This was likely due to the Quaker court's reliance on reputation-based instruments for enforcement. As Philadelphia's population grew, the meeting's practice of pressuring culprits into compliance through public shaming lost its edge. Accordingly, Friends moved their legal business to the public courts. The paper contributes to the debates on the legal pluralism of empires, the history of arbitration, and state formation in the Atlantic.
References
1
Monthly Meeting of Friends in Philadelphia (MMFP), Minutes 1757–1762, p. 240.
2
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, John Reynell Letterbook 1760–62, to Elias Bland, 14th of fourth month 1760, n.p.
3
An Act for the Relief of William Griffitts, with respect to the imprisonment of his person. Statutes at large of Pennsylvania. 1761, Act 0471. Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg.
4
MMFP 1757–1762, multiple entries from third month 1760 to fourth month 1761.
5
Benton, Lauren, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar, chapter 1.
6
Stern, Philip J., “British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (2006): 693–712Google Scholar, quote on p. 702. On legal plurality of British Atlantic see also Gould, Eliga H., “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” The William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 3 (2003): 471–510, 496CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7
Stern, Philip J., The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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Braddick, Michael J., State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 148–49; Resnik, Judith and Curtis, Dennis Edward, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. See also Burset, Christian, “Arbitrating the England Problem: Litigation, Private Ordering, and the Rise of the Modern Economy,” Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 36 (2020): 60Google Scholar for an overview over this literature.
9
Mann, Bruce H., “The Formalization of Informal Law: Arbitration Before the American Revolution,” NYUL Review 59 (1984): 443–465Google Scholar; Konig, David Thomas, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts: Essex County, 1629–1692 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004/1979)Google Scholar. See also Burset, “Arbitrating the England Problem,” 60.
10
Stern, The Company-State; Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence,” 502; Hulsebosch, Daniel J., Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5Google Scholar. Note that Britain itself remained largely legally pluralistic throughout the eighteenth century, see Loft, Philip, “A Tapestry of Laws: Legal Pluralism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” The Journal of Modern History 91, no. 2 (2019): 276–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11
Justin DuRivage and Claire Priest, “The Stamp Act and the Political Origins of American Legal and Economic Institutions,” The Southern California Law Review 88 (2014): 875.
12
Burset, “Arbitrating the England Problem.” For reliance on public courts for debt enforcement see p. 60; for quote “sense of chaos” see p. 53; on chambers of commerce providing arbitration see pp. 55, 56; quote on p. 53.
13
On Puritan arbitration see George Lee Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts: A Study in Tradition and Design (Milburne, NJ: University Press of America, 1984); Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts. On Quaker arbitration see Carli N. Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended: The Role of Extrajudicial Dispute Resolution in Antebellum Kentucky and New Jersey,” American Journal of Legal History 48 (2006): 39–98. F. Peter Phillips, “Ancient and Comely Order: The Use and Disuse of Arbitration by New York Quakers,” The Journal of Dispute Resolution (2016): 81–114; William McEnery Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men”: Law and Society in the Delaware Valley, 1680–1710 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995); Esther Sahle, “Law and Gospel Order: Resolving Commercial Disputes in Colonial Philadelphia,” Continuity and Change 35, no. 3 (2020): 281–310.
14
Burset, “Arbitrating the England Problem,” 56.
15
Mann, “The Formalization of Informal Law,” 443; Margo Todd, “For Eschewing of Trouble and Exorbitant Expense: Arbitration in the Early Modern British Isles,” The Journal of Dispute Resolution 2016 (2016): 7–18; Henry Horwitz and James Oldham, “John Locke, Lord Mansfield, and Arbitration during the Eighteenth Century,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 1 (1993): 137–59; Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, “The Late Medieval and Early Modern Hanse as an Institution of Conflict Management,” Continuity and Change 32, no. 1 (2017): 59–84; Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2011); Edmond Smith, Merchants: The Community That Shaped England's Trade and Empire, 1550–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), chapter 3.
16
Following modern understanding of law as pluralistic, I use the terms “court” and “legal forum” interchangeably. When referring to a legal forum belonging to the state I specify this as either “state court” or “public court.”
17
Derek Roebuck, The Golden Age of Arbitration: Dispute Resolution Under Elizabeth I (Oxford: The Arbitration Press, 2015).
18
Mann, “The Formalization of Informal Law”; Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts. Although legal historians have found structural changes in legal culture in the middle colonies, too, they have not focused on the relationship between arbitration and litigation in similar ways as the New England studies have done. See Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men”; Linda Briggs Biemer, The Transition from Dutch to English Law: Its Impact on Women in New York, 1643 to 1727 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1979); Deborah A. Rosen, “Courts and Commerce in Colonial New York,” The American Journal of Legal History 36 (1992): 139.
19
Burset, “Arbitrating the England Problem.”
20
Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 28.
21
Jerry W. Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America (New York City: Macmillan, 1973); Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended,” 39–98; Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1977); Digby Baltzell, Puritan Boston & Quaker Philadelphia (New York City: Routledge, 2017).
22
Horwitz, The Transformation.
23
Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended”; Phillips, “Ancient and Comely Order”; Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men.”
24
Esther Sahle, “A Faith of Merchants: Quakers and Institutional Change in the Early Modern Atlantic, c. 1660–1800” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2016), 184.
25
For a detailed discussion of Quaker disownment practices, see Esther Sahle, Quakers in the British Atlantic World, c. 1660–1800 (Martlesham, UK and Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2021), chapter 5.
26
Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended.”
27
Rosemary Moore, The Light in Their Consciences: Early Quakers in Britain, 1646–1666, Vol. 1 (University Park: Penn State Press, 2020); Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New York City: St Martin's Press, 1985).
28
Gary S. De Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party 1688–1715 (Clarendon Press, 1985); for an overview of attributes shared with other dissenting communities see Sahle, Quakers in the British Atlantic World, chapter 2.
29
Jordan Landes, London Quakers in the Trans-Atlantic World: The Creation of an Early Modern Community (New York City: Springer, 2015), 26; Ethyn Williams Kirby, “The Quakers’ Efforts to Secure Civil and Religious Liberty, 1660–96,” The Journal of Modern History 7, no. 4 (1935): 401–21; Alison Okson, “The Lobbying of London Quakers for Pennsylvania Friends,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 117, no. 3 (1993): 131–52.
30
John Miller, “‘A Suffering People’: English Quakers and Their Neighbours c. 1650–c. 1700,” Past & Present 188, no. 1 (2005): 71–103; Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press), 2007; Sahle, Quakers in the British Atlantic World.
31
Oliver Finnegean, “Quaker Outcasts and the Creation of Missionary Anglicanism, 1691–1706,” The English Historical Review 137 (2022): 109–39.
32
Stephen Saunders Webb, “‘The Peaceable Kingdom’: Quaker Pennsylvania in the Stuart Empire,” in The World of William Penn, eds. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 173–94.
33
Gary B. Nash, “The Free Society of Traders and the Early Politics of Pennsylvania,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 89, no. 2 (1965): 147–73, 149.
34
Margaret Salmon, “Notes and Documents: The Court Records of Philadelphia, Bucks, and Berks Counties in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1983): 249–91.
35
John Smolenski, “‘As the Discharge of My Conscience to God’: Narrative, Personhood, and the Construction of Legal Order in 17th-Century Quaker Culture,” Prospects 24 (1999): 117–75, 142.
36
Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men,” 19.
37
Smolenski, “As the Discharge of My Conscience to God,” 143.
38
Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men,” 19.
39
The Quaker monthly meeting is the only alternative legal forum mentioned in the literature so far. The records of other religious groups survive only from the second half of the eighteenth-century onward. I'm not aware of any research on indigenous dispute resolution procedures in Pennsylvania in this period.
40
MMFP – Monthly Meeting of Friends in Philadelphia. This is the men's meeting. I have found no evidence of arbitration in women's meeting minutes, hence the following discussion focuses on the men's meeting.
41
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Discipline, 1719. Haverford special collections.
42
For a detailed discussion of Quaker Discipline books, see Andrew Fincham, “Friendly Advice. The Making and Shaping of Quaker Discipline,” in Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690–1830, ed. Robynne Rogers Healey (University Park: Penn State Press, 2021), 73.
43
Roebuck, The Golden Age of Arbitration, chapter 1; Todd, “For Eschewing of Trouble and Exorbitant Expense”; Wubs-Mrozewicz, “The Late Medieval and Early Modern Hanse”; Carli Conklin discusses this in detail for the case of New Jersey Quakers: Carli A. Conklin, “A Variety of State-Level Procedures, Practices, and Policies: Arbitration in Early America,” Journal of Dispute Resolution, 55–79. See also Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM) Discipline 1719.
44
Burset, “Arbitrating the England Problem.” MMFP's minutes reflect this process exactly. Carli Conklin observed the same procedure in New Jersey Quaker meetings: Conklin, “A Variety of State-Level Procedures, Practices, and Policies.”
45
PYM, Discipline 1719.
46
Philadelphia County Court, Ledger, held at Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
47
This also mirrors what Nelson has suggested for Puritan arbitration boards in New England: while record survival was too poor to allow for definite conclusions, he thought that “breach of promise,” aka the failure to honor contracts and settle debts, constituted one of the two main types of disputes eighteenth-century Massachusetts churches arbitrated. This was also one of the main causes of conflicts in Massachusetts civil jurisdiction, suggesting that a specialization in chancery cases was not exceptional for colonial dissenting legal fori. See William E. Nelson, Dispute and Conflict Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725–1825 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2017), 35. The other was moral failings, which is likely also true for the Quaker meeting, however they had a separate procedure for those that did not involve arbitration.
48
Examples for cases involving bills of exchange include: MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 39, seventh month 1687, Samuel Carpenter vs Griffith Jones; Ibid., p. 61, second month 1690, Richard Whitfield vs Richard Cubbon. Examples for cases involving difference in accounts include: MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 98, twelfth month 1695, Richard Davis vs David Powell; MMFP minutes 1715–1744, p. 300, seventh month 1738, Benjamin Trotter vs Jacob Shute. Examples for cases involving debts upon bond include: MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 82, fourth month 1693, Richard Dean vs Richard Sutton; Ibid. p. 311, twelfth month 1712, Widow Hallwell vs John Harper.
49
Letter book of Francis Richardson, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
50
MMFP minutes 1715–1744, p. 92, tenth month 1722, Richard Lundy vs Ebenezer Large et al.; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 104, twelfth month 1696, Ralph Jackson vs Josiah Ferne; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 39, seventh month 1687, Samuel Carpenter vs Griffith Jones; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 104, twelfth month 1696, David Powell vs Richard Davis; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 281, tenth month 1710, Griffith Owen vs John Martin's estate; MMFP minutes 1715–1744, p. 251, ninth month 1734, John Salkelds vs Martha Trueman; MMFP minutes 1715–1744, p. 310, eleventh month 1738, Cadwallader Foulke vs Dennis Rochford; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 276, sixth month 1710, John Rodman vs David Lloyd; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 322, ninth month 1713, Widow Duckett vs Thomas Duckett; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 302, fourth month 1712, Isaac Norris vs Mary Duckett; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 61, second month 1690, Richard Whitfield vs Richard Cubbon; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 171, eleventh month 1702, Widow Goldsmith vs Robert Haydock; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 39, seventh month 1687, Samuel Carpenter vs Griffth Jones; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 117, tenth month 1698, Nathanial Lamplugh vs Thomas Duckett; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 34, second month 1687, Francis Richardson vs Elisabeth Frampton; MMFP minutes 1682–1714, p. 303, fourth month 1712, Isaac Norris vs John Walker.
51
MMFP 1682–1714, seventh month 1687, Samuel Carpenter vs Griffith Jones, p. 39.
52
Marc Galanter, “Justice in Many Rooms: Courts, Private Ordering, and Indigenous Law,” The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 13, no. 19 (1981): 1–47.
53
Burset, “Arbitrating the England Problem,” 36.
54
Anthoy Gregg Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of Virginia Legal Culture, 1680–1810 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2017), 79.
55
Ibid., 77, 78.
56
Todd, “For Eschewing of Trouble and Exorbitant Expense,” 15.
57
Mary Beth Norton, “Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History and Culture 44 (1987): 4–39, 35.
58
John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 73, 75; and Smolenski, “As the Discharge of My Conscience to God,” 149.
59
Todd, “For Eschewing of Trouble and Exorbitant Expense”; Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 123, 125; Haskins, Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts, 26, 27.
60
Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended”; Philips, “Ancient and Comely Order.”
61
Sahle, Quakers in the British Atlantic World, chapter 5.
62
MMFP 1715–1745, sixth month 1722, Samuel and Joseph Richardson vs William and Samuel Hudson, p. 88.
63
MMFP 1745–1755, seventh month 1753, Joshua Emlen vs John Renshaw, Sr., p. 232.
64
Ibid., eighth month, p. 234.
65
MMFP 1682–1714, eleventh month 1707, James Logan vs William Rakestraw, p. 241; MMFP 1715–1744, seventh month 1721, Joseph Richardson vs Samuel and William Richardson, p. 77; MMFP 1715–1744, tenth month 1722, Richard Lundy and Ebenzer Large vs Christopher Topham, p. 92; MMFP 1715–1744, first month 1723, John Durborow and Edward Pleadwell vs executors of James Atkinson, p. 95; MMFP 1745–1755, fourth month 1747, Thomas Nickson vs Adam Rhodes, p. 38; MMFP 1745–1755, fifth month 1746, Joseph Stretch vs Ralph Loftus, p. 20; MMFP 1745–1755, first month 1747, Isaac Norris and Elisabeth Norris vs executors of Nicholas Walln's estate, p. 33; MMFP 1757–1762, third month 1760, John Reynell and Elias Bland vs William Griffitts, p. 240.
66
MMFP 1745–1755, fourth month 1747, Testimony of Denial against Ralph Loftus, p. 37.
67
MMFP 1745–1755, tenth month 1747, Testimony of Denial against Adam Rhodes, p. 45.
68
Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended”; Philipps, “Ancient and Comely Order”; Horwitz, The Transformation.
69
Gary B. Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 56. On Pennsylvania's early and unusual economic success see also David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 560; Carl Bridenbaugh: “The Old and New Societies of the Delaware Valley in the Seventeenth Century,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1976): 145–63, 159, 168; Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family: British Settlement in the Delaware Valley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 6, 14; Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men,” 5.
70
Miller, “A Suffering People.”
71
Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men,” chapter 2. His study spares out Philadelphia, from where few court records survive. There is however no reason to believe that Friends in the capital differed in this regard from their rural and small-town co-religionists.
72
On frequent legal changes see for instance, Salmon, “Notes and Documents.” On Pennsylvania courts’ development see for instance Conklin, “Transformed, Not Transcended”; Edwin B. Bronner, “Philadelphia County Court of Quarter Sessions and Common Pleas, 1695,” The American Journal of Legal History, 1 (1957): 79–95; Lawrence Lewis, “The Courts of Pennsylvania in the Seventeenth Century,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 5 (1881): 141–190. William J. Offutt, “The Atlantic Rules: The Legalistic Turn in Colonial British America,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World. Anglo-America in the Trans-Atlantic World, eds. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 160–81, 174; Jack D. Marietta and G. S. Rowe, Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682–1800 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 20; A. Laussat, An Essay on Equity in Pennsylvania (Lawbook Exchange, 1826/2002).
73
Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “Turning Points and the Relevance of Colonial Legal History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1993): 7–17; Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts; John M. Murrin, “The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, eds. John Murrin and Douglass Greenberg (New York City: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages 1983/2001), 540–72.
74
Smolenski, “As the Discharge of My Conscience to God.”
75
William Edward Nelson, The Common Law in Colonial America: The Middle Colonies and the Carolinas, 1660–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2, 3.
76
Marietta and Rowe, Troubled Experiment, 20.
77
Offutt, “The Atlantic Rules,” 174; Marietta and Rowe, Troubled Experiment, 20; Laussat, An Essay on Equity, 22.
78
Marietta and Rowe, Troubled Experiment, 30, 32.
79
Billy G. Smith, “Death and Life in a Colonial Immigrant City: A Demographic Analysis of Philadelphia,” The Journal of Economic History 37, no. 4 (1977): 863–89.
80
Marietta, The Reformation, 47.
81
William H. Lloyd, “The Courts of Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century Prior to the Revolution,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review and American Law Register 56, no. 1 (1908): 34; Marietta and Rowe, Troubled Experiment, 30.
82
Robynne Rogers-Healy, “Introduction,” in Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690–1830, ed. Ibid. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021), 2.
83
Offutt, Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men,” 3; on defense finances: Bronner, “Philadelphia County Court,” 81.
84
Frederick Barnes Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682–1763 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1948/2017), 43.
85
John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 205.
86
See for instance, Christian R. Burset, “Merchant Courts, Arbitration, and the Politics of Commercial Litigation in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire,” Law and History Review 34, no. 3 (2016): 615–47; Claire Priest, “Law and Commerce, 1580–1815,” The Cambridge History of Law in America 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008): 400–46, 412; William C. Jones, “An Inquiry into the History of the Adjudication of Mercantile Disputes in Great Britain and the United States,” The University of Chicago Law Review 25 (1957): 445.
87
Amalia D. Kessler, Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800–1877 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 54.
88
Stanley Katz, “The Politics of Law in Colonial America: Controversies over Chancery Courts and Equity Law in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 266.
89
Lewis, “The Courts of Pennsylvania,” 147.
90
James Irwin Brownson, Equity in Pennsylvania from the Historical Point of View (Washington Bar Association, 1914/here reprint Miami, 2019), 17. For history of equity powers in Pennsylvania courts, repeatedly issued and repealed, see Spencer R. Liverant and Walter H. Hitchler, “A History of Equity in Pennsylvania,” Dickinson Law Review 37 (1933): 156–183; William Henry Rawle, Equity in Pennsylvania: A Lecture Delivered before the Law Academy of Philadelphia, February 11, 1868 (Philadelphia, 1868), especially 10–20; Sydney G. Fisher, “The Administration of Equity through Common Law Forms in Pennsylvania,” in Schools, Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1908).
91
Marietta and Rowe, Troubled Experiment, 33.
92
An equity court ledger extant from the period contains no entries before 1725. I would not interpret this to mean that it had no business, however. More likely, court minutes were kept elsewhere. See Katz, “The Politics of Law,” 268.
93
McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 205.
94
Smith, “Death and Life in a Colonial Immigrant City.”
95
Sahle, Quakers in the British Atlantic World.
96
MMFP 1682–1714, ninth month 1701, Widow Moore vs Philip England, p. 155.
97
MMFP 1715–1744, eighth month 1723, George Claypoole vs Jonathan Dickinson, p. 101.
98
MMFP 1682–1714, second month 1706, Thomas Story vs Richard Sutton, pp. 215, 216.
99
Rosen, “Courts and Commerce in Colonial New York,” and Francis, Clinton W., “Practice, Strategy, and Institution: Debt Collection in the English Common-Law Courts 1740–1840,” The Northwestern University Law Review 80 (1985): 807–940Google Scholar for England: both have evidence of attorneys settling disputes out of court after they disappear from the records. Entering a suit in a legal forum hence was a means of putting the other party under pressure to find an out-of-court solution.
100
Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts, 28, specifically uses this to test the effectiveness of Puritan church arbitration versus public courts. See also Rosen, “Courts and Commerce in Colonial New York,” 154, who found this to have been the case among New York courts.
101
MMFP 1682–1714, first month 1698, p. 119, Alice Guest vs Arthur Cook, p. 119.
102
MMFP minutes 1682–1714, first month 1709, James Kite vs Emmanuel Walker, p. 257. For further examples see: MMFP 1682–1714, tenth month 1713, William Reall vs Joshua Granger, p. 325; MMFP 1682–1714, ninth month 1713, Richard Hill vs Samuel Taylor, p. 323; MMFP 1682–1714, ninth month 1713, Thomas Barnes vs Thomas Broadgate, p. 323; MMFP 1715–1744, seventh month 1715, Isaac Norris vs Thomas Masters, p. 8; MMFP 1715–1744, sixth month, Thomas Potts vs Thomas Shute, p. 19; MMFP 1715–1744, third month 1717, John Worrall vs Thomas Pryor, p. 27; MMFP 1715–1744, third month 1717, Richard Moore vs Henry Child, p. 28; MMFP 1715–1744, eighth month 1723, George Claypoole vs Jonathan Dickinson, p. 101; MMFP 1715–1744, second month 1729, Mary Lisle vs John Heart, p. 170; MMFP 1715–1744, second month 1729, William Carter vs George Shoemaker, p. 170; MMFP 1715–1744, seventh month 1738, Benjamin Trotter vs Jacob Shute, p. 300; MMFP 1715–1744, sixth month 1738, William Hudson vs Isaac Bolton, p. 299; MMFP 1715–1744, eleventh month 1738, Cadwallader Foulke vs Dennis Rochford, p. 304; MMFP 1715–1744, fifth month 1738, Samuel Powell vs Isaac Bolton, p. 298; MMFP 1715–1744, tenth month 1739, Joshua Walton vs Hugh Durburrow, p. 313; MMFP 1745–1755, eighth month 1746, William Cundall vs Adam Rhodes, p. 24; MMFP 1745–1755, eighth month 1749, Armitt Renshaw vs Richard Renshaw, p. 111; MMFP 1745–1755, eighth month 1749, Israel Pemberton vs Peter Lloyd (estate of), p. 111; MMFP 1745–1755, tenth month 1750, John Burr vs Thomas Fisher, p. 160; MMFP 1745–1755, eleventh month 1750, Thomas Lightfoot vs Thomas Fisher, p. 282.
103
MMFP, minutes 1715–1745, fifth month 1722, p. 87.
104
Ibid., eighth month 1722, p. 89.
105
Ibid., fifth month 1738, Samuel Powell vs Isaac Bolton, p. 298; see also Ibid., seventh month 1738, Benjamin Trotter vs Jacob Shute, p. 300, the meeting equally leaves him to litigate after he insists.
106
Further examples: MMFP minutes 1745–1755, sixth month 1746, p. 20, Ralph Loftus also had notice and refused to attend the meeting; equally MMFP minutes 1715–1745, Elizabeth Griffitts, second month 1742, p. 340.
107
Sahle, Quakers in the British Atlantic World.
108
HSP John Reynell Letterbook 1760–62, Letter to Elias Bland, 28th of sixth month 1760, n.p.
109
MMFP Minutes 1757–1762, first month 1761, adjourned meeting, p. 308.
110
Unger, Richard, “Income Differentials, Institutions, and Religion: Working in the Rhineland or Pennsylvania in the Eighteenth Century,” in Working on Labor Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, eds. Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 269–95Google Scholar.
111
Murrin, “The Legal Transformation,” 540–72.
112
Stern, The Company-State.
113
For an overview of this literature see Sahle, Esther, “Quakers, Coercion, and Pre-Modern Growth: Why Friends’ Formal Institutions for Contract Enforcement Did Not Matter for Early Modern Trade Expansion,” The Economic History Review 71, no. 2 (2018): 418–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
114
McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British America, 205.
