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

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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.