Chris Brooks, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, was a pioneer of the history of law, particularly in the civil war period in England and its aftermath. Before his book Pettyfoggers and Vipers of the Commonwealth (1986), the discipline had focused on the big picture of the constitution and the disputes of wealthy men, with the occasional examination of the lot of the poor. Chris concentrated instead on the "middling sort" – the rising middle classes and the "lawyers" who advised them – in short, the origin of solicitors.
By doing so, he was focusing on the people who were going to make the law work after a nightmare of lawlessness during the civil war. These new lawyers were men who scoured pubs on market days in small towns across the country, offering their services to people who otherwise would have had no access to any kind of legal representation.
Chris believed that the law was a mechanism for resolving disputes in a progressively better way, but which often went wrong, either because it was distorted by money or too complex. He also realised the system's considerable absurdities. At the beginning of the 17th century, most of the law was still in Latin. By the end, it was largely in English, the pleasing result of the fact that ordinary people had not the slightest idea what the lawyers were on about and voted with their feet. Solicitors could still be vipers and pettifoggers, but at least they spoke English; the law had begun to be truly relevant to everyday life.
Subsequent collections of essays – Lawyers, Litigation and English Society Since 1450 (1998) and The Middling Sort of People (1994, co-edited with Jonathan Barry) – went on to detail the way ordinary people reacted to law in disputes with their neighbours, scrutinising everyday social and legal interactions. He searched high and low in the records of England for such stories, staying in B&Bs to hunt them down in small town archives, revealing such unlikely gems as the consequences of fornicating in church (so prevalent were such activities that the church courts of the 17th century were known as "bawdy courts").
Born in Salisbury, Maryland, Chris was the son of Charles, a car salesman, and Frances, a medical receptionist. In 1964 he married Sharyn, whom he first met at the age of 15, and in 1972 became an officer in the US army. He took his first degree at Princeton, and then went to Linacre College, Oxford to do a doctorate. After a stint as a fellow of Brasenose College, he and Sharyn went north to Durham in 1980, and he continued to teach at the university there for 33 years.
As an American, Chris was acutely conscious of the common legal heritage with England that had produced the US constitution. He was a founder board member of the Law and History Review, the journal of the American Society for Legal History. His academic reputation brought him Mellon and Leverhulme fellowships, and he had recently returned from a year in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, where he was in the final stages of preparing for publication the civil war volume of The Oxford History of the Laws of England. When asked by a journalist what the intended deadline was, he said he expected to deliver it in eight years' time; a cause of much merriment.
Chris was looking forward to retirement in Florida, though he laughed at a recent declaration by the governor of that state that from now on, the schools would teach only "historical fact". He regarded such a concept as absurd; history was a wealth of human experience, and if there is anything to learn from it, it is how we might get on better with each other.
He is survived by Sharyn, their son, Gavin, and daughter, Tracy.
• Chris Brooks, historian, born 7 December 1948; died 19 August 2014
