Private Law and medieval village society: personal actions in manor courts, c.1250-1350
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Geography
Abstract
Much effort has been expended over a long period and in several academic disciplines in investigating the two-way relationship between laws on the one hand, and socio-economic change on the other. Our research project reflects the belief that this relationship offers a most fruitful way of looking at history in general and at the history of medieval rural England in particular.
Our specific interest lies in the idea that the rules and machinery of the civil law substantially influenced the readiness with which individuals committed resources to transactions and agreements, and shaped behaviour towards the persons and property of others. To explore this, our immediate focus is on the workings of the law, as our main aim is to advance knowledge of the civil justice available to ordinary people, but the project outputs will ultimately shed light on the nature of economic conditions and social relations between 1250 and 1350.
The manor court, a private jurisdiction held by a landlord for his tenants, was for most English people the dominant point of contact with formal law. We will study 70 sets of court rolls, which are the records of proceedings of particular manor courts. Our rolls are in two groups: an 'eastern group' from manors in five East Anglian counties, and a 'western group' from manors in five west midland counties, plus one Welsh estate.
Two members of the project team will study each group, keying relevant entries into computer databases.
We will use the evidence gathered to reconstruct all aspects of the laws and procedures observed in prosecuting private lawsuits ('personal actions') of debt, broken agreement, and trespass in manor courts. We will also use it to find out how far and in what ways these laws and procedures varied between manors, and between the regions studied. Another key aim in interrogating this data is to discover whether chronological changes in the handling of personal actions occurred within individual courts, and, if so, to establish whether similar changes took place simultaneously across several courts. Our findings on these issues in the area of debt litigation will appear in a volume containing an edition of court roll texts with an interpretative introduction entitled Select Debt Cases in Manor Courts, to be completed during the project, and equivalent findings on trespass will form a separate article.
Although members of our team have produced independent studies of the practices of specific manor courts, only through a collaborative effort covering many manors will we be able to make reliable generalizations about the character of manorial litigation in personal actions, the scope for change in this area within discrete courts, and the scale of relevant variation between courts. This will then yield major advances in understanding of the geography and historical evolution of the legal universes in which peasants conducted economic decision-making and social relations.
Medievalists working on manor courts will not be the sole audience to benefit from the research on Select Debt Cases, since we will publish an overview of the study and its implications in a leading general historical journal. Our work will also boost research in connected fields. We will engage with legal
Historians of the common law of royal courts through a part of our project which evaluates the 'downward' transfer of common law litigation practices as a factor leading to homogeneity among manor courts. The project will also benefit social and economic historians of medieval rural commerce and -edit, who currently lack the essential legal and procedural framework in which to interpret the copious manorial litigation evidence on peasant market relations. More broadly, the stress on the interdependence of civil legal structures, economic development and social practices exemplified by this work makes for an approach designed to stimulate historians and social scientists working on a wide range of periods and regions.
Our specific interest lies in the idea that the rules and machinery of the civil law substantially influenced the readiness with which individuals committed resources to transactions and agreements, and shaped behaviour towards the persons and property of others. To explore this, our immediate focus is on the workings of the law, as our main aim is to advance knowledge of the civil justice available to ordinary people, but the project outputs will ultimately shed light on the nature of economic conditions and social relations between 1250 and 1350.
The manor court, a private jurisdiction held by a landlord for his tenants, was for most English people the dominant point of contact with formal law. We will study 70 sets of court rolls, which are the records of proceedings of particular manor courts. Our rolls are in two groups: an 'eastern group' from manors in five East Anglian counties, and a 'western group' from manors in five west midland counties, plus one Welsh estate.
Two members of the project team will study each group, keying relevant entries into computer databases.
We will use the evidence gathered to reconstruct all aspects of the laws and procedures observed in prosecuting private lawsuits ('personal actions') of debt, broken agreement, and trespass in manor courts. We will also use it to find out how far and in what ways these laws and procedures varied between manors, and between the regions studied. Another key aim in interrogating this data is to discover whether chronological changes in the handling of personal actions occurred within individual courts, and, if so, to establish whether similar changes took place simultaneously across several courts. Our findings on these issues in the area of debt litigation will appear in a volume containing an edition of court roll texts with an interpretative introduction entitled Select Debt Cases in Manor Courts, to be completed during the project, and equivalent findings on trespass will form a separate article.
Although members of our team have produced independent studies of the practices of specific manor courts, only through a collaborative effort covering many manors will we be able to make reliable generalizations about the character of manorial litigation in personal actions, the scope for change in this area within discrete courts, and the scale of relevant variation between courts. This will then yield major advances in understanding of the geography and historical evolution of the legal universes in which peasants conducted economic decision-making and social relations.
Medievalists working on manor courts will not be the sole audience to benefit from the research on Select Debt Cases, since we will publish an overview of the study and its implications in a leading general historical journal. Our work will also boost research in connected fields. We will engage with legal
Historians of the common law of royal courts through a part of our project which evaluates the 'downward' transfer of common law litigation practices as a factor leading to homogeneity among manor courts. The project will also benefit social and economic historians of medieval rural commerce and -edit, who currently lack the essential legal and procedural framework in which to interpret the copious manorial litigation evidence on peasant market relations. More broadly, the stress on the interdependence of civil legal structures, economic development and social practices exemplified by this work makes for an approach designed to stimulate historians and social scientists working on a wide range of periods and regions.
Organisations
Publications
BRIGGS C
(2014)
Introduction: law courts, contracts and rural society in Europe, 1200-1600
in Continuity and Change
Briggs C
(2020)
The Evolution of Manor Courts in Medieval England, c. 1250-1350: The Evidence of the Personal Actions
in The Journal of Legal History
Briggs C.D
(2014)
Understanding Edwardian villagers' use of law:some manor court litigation evidence
in Reading Medieval Studies
Briggs C.D
(2014)
Serfdom and Slavery in the European Economy 11th-18th Centuries
Schofield P R
(2013)
Thirteenth Century England
Schofield P R
(2011)
Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages
| Description | First, this project has provided a much clearer understanding of chronological and spatial patterns in the practices and procedures observed in litigation about debt, trespass and broken agreement (covenant) in England's manor courts between c.1250 and 1350. We have looked at lawsuits in these categories recorded in 103 separate sets of manor court records (covering around 150 different courts) from five eastern and five western counties. Taking an overview of these records, we observe a definite convergence in recording practice over this period, which we interpret as a proxy for convergence in underlying curial procedures and principles. Equally, within this certain courts displayed distinctive procedural features that do not appear to follow any obvious pattern with regard to lordship or geography. Second, this project has shown that civil litigation in manor courts was (or had by 1350 become) a formal business which was understood by all to involve clear rules, even if those rules were often peculiar to specific courts. Lay litigants were expected to know the rules and were quick to point out where opponents had failed to observe rules. Litigation was not infinitely malleable but was a structured process in which litigants had to do and say specific things in a specific order to avoid defeat. For instance, the inclusion of the place and date on which a disputed transaction supposedly took place suggests that these were important elements of the plaintiff's complaint, or 'count'. Within certain clear jurisdictional boundaries (which we have reconstructed via this project) the manor courts were able to handle a very wide range of civil complaints in terms of subject matter, and they must have been the first port of call for most people. Although questions of substantive law were discussed in manorial litigation over debt, trespass and covenant (see below), arguments in court about correct procedure were probably more common. Further to this, the project has also illustrated ways in which substantive law may be identified and explored in terms of content in the manor court. While there has been some discussion of substantive law in relation to disputes over land and its transfer in the medieval manor, there is far less discussion of the law behind litigation over debt and the like. This project, by identifying individual and detailed cases over a wide range of manorial courts has allowed us to set out some of the ways in which issues of substance were employed in manorial court litigation and to consider the variety of substantive law and its application at the level of the manor. Finally, and also following from these earlier points, the project has revealed plentiful evidence for the role of third parties in facilitating both legal process and legal argument within the manor court. Pleadings illustrate the potential role of attorneys and stewards in discussion of substantive law and its application on a case by case basis, and, notwithstanding the earlier and important point that manor litigants included those who were highly informed and capable of litigating on their own behalf, there is clear indication of the role of third parties as advisers to litigants. |
| Exploitation Route | Many of the manor court roll series we worked on have not previously been subject to significant study. Examples are most numerous in the hitherto rather neglected western counties, such as the manors of the Hereford dean and chapter, especially Norton Canon, Preston-on-Wye, and Woolhope. Our project will help open up these valuable records for further investigation, perhaps in future doctoral or postdoctoral projects. Our project has raised questions about the relationship between manor courts and the royal courts of common law that are impossible to answer fully on the basis of manorial records alone. Drawing on the results of our project, considerable scope exists for future collaboration between researchers on our project and those actively engaged in the records of the common law courts. The treatises on pleading: as part of our investigation into the communication of legal principles among individual manor courts, and of the role of legal professionals in these tribunals, we have begun to study a group of contemporary treatises that functioned as 'handbooks' on pleading in (usually unspecified) local courts. These texts in law French have received some attention in the past, but there is much more to be done in determining the relationship between the various versions, their intended audience, and the context of their composition. The treatises on pleading seem to have been intended mainly to guide those actually conducting pleading. We need to determine how far these treatises were intended to guide practice in manorial jurisdictions (as opposed to other local courts like hundred courts), and if not, who used them and in what context. This would make an excellent doctoral project (or projects). |
| Sectors | Security and Diplomacy |
| Description | The research on the development of local forms curial procedure and forms of action have been of interest to lawyers interested in forms of legal evolution. Findings have been presented at a range of national and international conferences of historians and legal historians. The work has been of particular interest to scholars of serfdom and the common law since the types of institutions studied were in a strict sense private courts in theory but in practice they were not insulated from influences from the crown courts. Work had also interested economists with interests in institutional arrangement that serve to minimize risk and bolster certainty in contracts in devekloping economies. Interest in the sources upon which this research is based has been considerable in local English and Welsh record offices and museums. There is a resulting interest among local and amateur historians who form a significant group of non-academic users. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2009 |
| Sector | Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Economic |
| Title | MS Access database containing over 7,000 records each representing an entry from the records of a medieval manor court |
| Description | |
| Type Of Material | Database/Collection of data |
| Provided To Others? | No |