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

在研究法律和社会经济变化之间的双向关系方面，人们在很长一段时间里和在几个学术学科上都付出了很大努力。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整个历史，特别是中世纪英格兰农村的历史。我们的具体兴趣在于，民法的规则和机制在很大程度上影响了个人将资源投入交易和协议的意愿，并塑造了对他人的人身和财产的行为。为了探讨这一点，我们目前的重点是法律的运作，因为我们的主要目标是促进普通人对民事司法的了解，但项目成果最终将阐明1250年至1350年期间经济状况和社会关系的性质。庄园法院是房东为其房客持有的私人司法管辖区，对大多数英国人来说，它是与正式法律的主要接触点。我们将研究70套法庭记录，这些记录是特定庄园法院的诉讼记录。我们的名单分为两组：一组来自东盎格鲁五个县的庄园，另一组来自西米德兰五个县的庄园，外加一座威尔士庄园。项目组的两名成员将研究每一组，将相关条目输入计算机数据库。我们将使用收集的证据来重建在起诉私人债务诉讼(个人诉讼)、违反协议和非法侵入庄园法院时所遵守的法律和程序的所有方面。我们还将利用它来找出这些法律和程序在多大程度上以及以什么方式在庄园之间以及所研究的地区之间存在差异。审问这一数据的另一个关键目的是查明个人诉讼处理的时间顺序变化是否发生在个别法院内，如果是，则确定几个法院是否同时发生类似的变化。我们在债务诉讼领域对这些问题的调查结果将载于一卷法院登记册文本，并附有将在项目期间完成的题为《庄园法院债务案件精选》的解释性介绍，关于非法侵入的同等调查结果将形成一篇单独的文章。虽然我们的团队成员已经对具体庄园法院的做法进行了独立研究，但只有通过涵盖多个庄园的合作努力，我们才能对个人诉讼中庄园诉讼的性质、不同法院在这一领域的变化范围以及法院之间的相关差异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世界的地理和历史演变方面取得重大进展。从事庄园法庭工作的中世纪学者不会是唯一受益于精选债务案件研究的受众，因为我们将在一本领先的普通历史期刊上发表这项研究及其影响的概述。我们的工作还将促进互联领域的研究。我们将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是导致庄园法院同质化的一个因素，从而与皇家法院普通法的法律历史学家进行接触。该项目还将使中世纪农村商业和编辑方面的社会和经济史学家受益，他们目前缺乏必要的法律和程序框架来解释关于农民市场关系的大量庄园诉讼证据。更广泛地说，这项工作强调民事法律结构、经济发展和社会实践之间的相互依存，形成了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.