单选题 .  ①Historian F. W. Maitland observed that legal documents are the best—indeed, often the only—available evidence about the economic and social history of a given period. ②Why, then, has it taken so long for historians to focus systematically on the civil (noncriminal) law of early modern (sixteenth- to eighteenth-century) England? ③Maitland offered one reason: the subject requires researchers to "master an extremely formal system of pleading and procedure." ④Yet the complexities that confront those who would study such materials are not wholly different from those recently surmounted by historians of criminal law in England during the same period. ⑤Another possible explanation for historians' neglect of the subject is their widespread assumption that most people in early modern England had little contact with civil law. ⑥If that were so, the history of legal matters would be of little relevance to general historical scholarship. ⑦But recent research suggests that civil litigation during the period involved artisans, merchants, professionals, shopkeepers, and farmers, and not merely a narrow, propertied, male elite. ⑧Moreover, the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary explosion in civil litigation by both women and men, making this the most litigious era in English history on a per capita basis.1.  The passage suggests that the history of criminal law in early modern England differs from the history of civil law during that same period in that the history of criminal law ______