Private Law and medieval village society: personal actions in manor courts, c.1250-1350

长期以来，在几个学科中，为调查法律与社会经济变化之间的双向关系，已经付出了大量努力。我们的研究项目反映了这样一种信念，即这种关系提供了一种最富有成效的方式来看待历史，特别是中世纪英格兰乡村的历史。我们的具体兴趣在于这样一种想法，即民法的规则和机制实质上影响了个人将资源投入交易和协议的意愿，并塑造了对他人人身和财产的行为。为了探索这一点，我们当前的重点是法律的运作，因为我们的主要目标是提高普通人对民事司法的认识，但项目成果最终将揭示1250年至1350年间经济条件和社会关系的性质。庄园法庭是地主对其佃户拥有的私人司法权，对大多数英国人来说，庄园法庭是与正式法律接触的主要场所。我们将研究70套法院名册，这些名册是特定庄园法院的诉讼记录。我们的名册分为两组：一组是来自五个东盎格鲁郡庄园的“东部组”，另一组是来自五个西米德兰郡庄园的“西部组”，外加一个威尔士庄园。项目小组的两名成员将研究每组，将相关条目输入计算机数据库。我们将使用收集到的证据来重建法律和程序的各个方面，在起诉私人诉讼（“个人行为”）的债务，破坏协议，并在庄园法庭非法侵入。我们还将利用它来了解这些法律和程序在不同庄园之间以及在所研究的地区之间有多大的差异。询问这些数据的另一个关键目的是发现在处理个人诉讼方面是否发生了时间顺序上的变化，如果是这样，确定类似的变化是否同时发生在几个法院。我们在债务诉讼领域对这些问题的调查结果将出现在一卷包含一个版本的法院名册文本与解释性介绍题为选择债务案件庄园法院，将在项目期间完成，并对侵入的同等调查结果将形成一个单独的文章。尽管我们的团队成员已经对特定庄园法院的实践进行了独立的研究，但只有通过涵盖许多庄园的合作努力，我们才能够对个人诉讼中庄园诉讼的特征、离散法院在这一领域的变化范围以及法院之间相关差异的规模做出可靠的概括。这将在理解农民进行经济决策和社会关系的法律的宇宙的地理和历史演变方面取得重大进展。在庄园法庭工作的中世纪学者将不会是受益于选择债务案件研究的唯一观众，因为我们将在一份领先的综合历史期刊上发表这项研究及其影响的概述。我们的工作也将促进相关领域的研究。我们将与皇家法院普通法的法律的历史学家通过我们的项目的一部分，评估普通法诉讼实践的“向下”转移，作为导致庄园法院同质化的一个因素。该项目也将有利于社会和经济历史学家的中世纪农村商业和编辑，谁目前缺乏必要的法律的和程序框架，以解释丰富的庄园诉讼证据对农民市场关系。更广泛地说，强调民事法律的结构、经济发展和社会实践之间的相互依存关系，这一工作有助于采取一种旨在激励历史学家和社会科学家在广泛的时期和地区开展工作的方法。

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.