The History of English Law c. 880-1220
Lead Research Organisation:
University of St Andrews
Department Name: History
Abstract
My research during the period of AHRC Leave will complete a thorough examination of the history of English law from the time of King Alfred (871-899) up to the time of Magna Carta (1215).
The scale of the volume to be completed - c. 300,000 words - allows it to combine the functions of a very extended monograph based on major original research with those of a survey for general use by historians and lawyers. The standard work in the field remains, a century on, F. W. Maitland's History of English Law, but his primary focus was on the period after 1220. More recent historical writing, fresh approaches, and additional sources have all rendered essential a new study.
My book argues for the vital role of the Anglo-Saxon period in providing ideas of powerful legislative kingship, strong government, local courts connected to the king, and many elements significant to later law regarding crime. The Anglo-Norman period crucially preserved this legacy, and saw the introduction of new customs regarding land-holding. Such developments were necessary but not sufficient conditions for the formation of the English Common Law. The Angevin period produced essential elements of routinization, in part connected to an increasingly literate legal culture. At this time royal justices may have exercised their greatest influence over the development of law, acting as a major force for standardization. Increasingly justices were deciding cases, rather than simply presiding over courts, but their expertise was yet to be rivaled by that of a legal profession representing litigants. By the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, law was growing more distanced from ordinary social practice, as certain royal legal measures were having effects which surprised parties to cases. At the same time, we see the emergence of legal devices based on unintended effects of the technicalities of law These developments underlie the emergence of the legal profession and of legal change through professional argument, judicial decision, and legislation, which would characterize much later Common Law development.
The volume is divided into three chronological periods: that up to 1066, the century after the Norman Conquest, and the decades c. 1160-1220. For each period, individual chapters are devoted to kingship, legislation, and justice; courts and court procedure; land; moveables; theft and violence; status; family. Two of the three chronological sections are now complete, and the third will be finished by the time of the AHRC Research Leave.
This leaves for completion during the AHRC Research Leave three main chapters, chapters that cover the entirety of the period. The first is on urban law, a subject often neglected within legal histories. This will be examined for its own sake, but also for its possible influence on wider legal developments, both in terms of procedure and of substantive thinking, for example on the nature of ownership. The other two chapters will consider the changing relationship of law and society. The first will set law within a wider context of disputing, examining changes and continuities in the relationship of legal and extra-legal or extra-curial activities. The second will examine the relationship of legal and other norms, arguing that there was a sharpening of the distinction between the two particularly in the last decades of my period. This sharpening, as already indicated, would have a very important effect on the later history of legal development. Short introductory and concluding chapters, also to be written during AHRC research leave, will set these themes in the contexts of legal historiography, of European legal practice from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, and of the longer-term history of English law.
The scale of the volume to be completed - c. 300,000 words - allows it to combine the functions of a very extended monograph based on major original research with those of a survey for general use by historians and lawyers. The standard work in the field remains, a century on, F. W. Maitland's History of English Law, but his primary focus was on the period after 1220. More recent historical writing, fresh approaches, and additional sources have all rendered essential a new study.
My book argues for the vital role of the Anglo-Saxon period in providing ideas of powerful legislative kingship, strong government, local courts connected to the king, and many elements significant to later law regarding crime. The Anglo-Norman period crucially preserved this legacy, and saw the introduction of new customs regarding land-holding. Such developments were necessary but not sufficient conditions for the formation of the English Common Law. The Angevin period produced essential elements of routinization, in part connected to an increasingly literate legal culture. At this time royal justices may have exercised their greatest influence over the development of law, acting as a major force for standardization. Increasingly justices were deciding cases, rather than simply presiding over courts, but their expertise was yet to be rivaled by that of a legal profession representing litigants. By the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, law was growing more distanced from ordinary social practice, as certain royal legal measures were having effects which surprised parties to cases. At the same time, we see the emergence of legal devices based on unintended effects of the technicalities of law These developments underlie the emergence of the legal profession and of legal change through professional argument, judicial decision, and legislation, which would characterize much later Common Law development.
The volume is divided into three chronological periods: that up to 1066, the century after the Norman Conquest, and the decades c. 1160-1220. For each period, individual chapters are devoted to kingship, legislation, and justice; courts and court procedure; land; moveables; theft and violence; status; family. Two of the three chronological sections are now complete, and the third will be finished by the time of the AHRC Research Leave.
This leaves for completion during the AHRC Research Leave three main chapters, chapters that cover the entirety of the period. The first is on urban law, a subject often neglected within legal histories. This will be examined for its own sake, but also for its possible influence on wider legal developments, both in terms of procedure and of substantive thinking, for example on the nature of ownership. The other two chapters will consider the changing relationship of law and society. The first will set law within a wider context of disputing, examining changes and continuities in the relationship of legal and extra-legal or extra-curial activities. The second will examine the relationship of legal and other norms, arguing that there was a sharpening of the distinction between the two particularly in the last decades of my period. This sharpening, as already indicated, would have a very important effect on the later history of legal development. Short introductory and concluding chapters, also to be written during AHRC research leave, will set these themes in the contexts of legal historiography, of European legal practice from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, and of the longer-term history of English law.
Organisations
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ORCID iD |
| John Hudson (Principal Investigator) |
