The Court Clerk's First Circuit
A Medieval Coming of Age

About this book:

Fourteen-year-old Robin knows the exact angle a goose quill must meet vellum, the recipe for ink black enough to drink the light, and the Latin phrases that bind men to the King's peace. He does not know the weight of a saddle, the stench of a circuit court riding into the shires, or the terrible power that lives in a clerk's hand when he decides which words enter the record—and which vanish into the margin.

Sent from the cathedral's quiet scriptorium onto the mud-churned roads of Justice de Langley's circuit, Robin becomes the judge's memory and his conscience. From fenland inns to gallows hills, from a miller's disputed common right to a widow's stolen acre, the boy records the settlements and the betrayals, the confessions extracted by fear and the verdicts bought with silver. But when the register itself becomes a weapon, Robin discovers that the law is not written in stone—it is written in ink, and ink can be erased.

Rich with the textures of medieval life—the scrape of knife on parchment, the clink of the inkhorn at a clerk's hip, the cold calculus of power—*The Court Clerk's First Circuit* is an immersive coming-of-age tale that asks an enduring question: when the powerful write the history, what duty does the witness owe to the truth?