Conclusion
The use of taverns, inns and houses to conduct a great variety of transactions is a prime example of how legal culture was not confined to the official forum of a law court. The ways in which these transactions were performed, moreover, give us insight into the legal behaviour of fifteenth-century urban citizens.
There are four points which the discussed examples serve to illustrate. First, instrumental in making the wijncoep and other ceremonies part of legal culture was their recognition not only by the parties involved, but also by the authorities. Administrative recognition allowed for a practice of conducting legally binding transactions outside the courthouse and without any involvement of court officials. That is, of course, until something went wrong, and parties actively sought resolution in court as is evidenced in the Liber Testium. That is the second point. The third is that, until parties appeared in court and witnesses were asked to give testimony, the practice in Kampen was still wholly oral in the late fifteenth century. The witnesses to the contract could testify as to its content and their testimony was accepted as proof in court. This is worthy of note in a period which saw legal practice increasingly being documented in writing. Of course, in Aberdeen similar transactions appear to have been conducted in the presence of a notary and were recorded by him already, though these transactions too were conducted, at least partially, in houses. Finally, a transaction conducted in a house appears to have had an equal status in law to that confirmed in a courthouse. The legal space in which it was conducted was not so much physical as situational and ceremonial. It was inhabited by the gelage, the small community temporarily joined through the act of the wijncoep.