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Private Law and Medieval Village Society: Personal Actions in Manor Courts, c.1250-c.1350
This project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, began in October 2006 and runs for three years. The HPSS team working on the project consists of Professor Richard Smith, who is the project's Principal Investigator, and Dr Chris Briggs. We are working in collaboration with the Department of History and Welsh History at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where Professor Phillipp Schofield, the project's Co-Investigator, is based.
Researchers working in a wide range of academic disciplines have expended a great deal of effort over a long period in investigating the two-way relationship that exists between law on the one hand, and social and economic change on the other. Our research project springs from the conviction that this relationship offers a fruitful way of looking at history in general, and at the history of rural England in the middle ages in particular. Our specific interest lies in the proposition that the rules and machinery of civil law substantially influenced both the readiness with which individuals committed resources to transactions and agreements of all kinds, and shaped behaviour towards the persons and property of others. To explore this, our immediate concern is with the workings of the law, as our main objective is to advance knowledge of the civil justice available to ordinary rural people, but the project outputs are in part ultimately intended to shed light on the nature of economic development and the tenor of social relations prevailing in England between 1250 and 1350. The manor court, a private jurisdiction held by a landlord for his tenants and other local people, was for most English people the main point of contact with formal law. Such courts existed in their thousands, but we are studying approximately 70 sets of court rolls, which are the surviving records of proceedings from a particular manor. The rolls chosen fall into two groups: an 'eastern group' relating to manors located within five East Anglian counties, and a 'western group', which relate to manors within five west midland counties, plus an estate in the Welsh marches. The Cambridge-based members of our team are studying the 'eastern' group of rolls, while the Aberystwyth-based members are working on the 'western' group.
We will use the evidence gathered to reconstruct all aspects of the laws and procedures involved in prosecuting private lawsuits of debt, broken covenant (broken agreement), and trespass through the manor court (lawsuits known collectively as 'personal actions'). We will also use it to find out how far and in what ways these laws and procedures varied between manors, and between the two regions studied. Another key aim in interrogating this data is to discover whether chronological changes occurred within individual manor courts in the handling of personal actions, and, if they did, to establish whether similar changes took place simultaneously across courts, rather than occurring in an unconnected fashion. Our findings on these issues in the area of debt and covenant litigation will be presented in a volume containing an edition of court roll texts with an interpretative introduction entitled Select Debt Cases in Manor Courts 1250-1350, to be completed during the project.
Although members of our project team have already produced independent studies of the practices of specific individual manor courts, only through this collaborative project covering a large set of manors will we be able to reach convincing conclusions about the overall character of manorial litigation in personal actions, the capacity for changes in this sphere within individual manor courts, and the extent of relevant variations between one such tribunal and another. This in turn will generate a major advance in understanding of the geography and historical evolution of the legal universes in which English peasants conducted their economic decision-making and social relationships.