Chris Briggs

How should we characterise interactions between ordinary medieval folk and the law? The topic might conjure up images of draconian punishments for petty crimes, or the arbitrary treatment of villagers at the hands of landlords and sheriffs, perhaps influenced by the legends of Robin Hood.

One might imagine, too, that if things were bad for medieval England’s peasantry in general, then the experiences before the law of that subset of the peasantry who were unfree serfs (or ‘villeins’) must have been even worse. Even if you don’t believe that law was an instrument of class oppression in the past, you might still assume that the structures of the law were designed primarily to meet the needs of those who had most wealth and influence. 

However, a substantial body of research that has been ongoing since the 1980s – and to which researchers at Campop have made a substantial contribution – shows that this was far from the full story. In fact, the rural people who made up the vast majority of the population belonged to a larger legal world characterized by sophisticated law courts, formal procedures, and written records. Many of the subjects that have traditionally been the focus of Campop research – family, kinship, inheritance, ageing, and social structure – were profoundly shaped by the nature of the law, and the institutions that administered it. The development of markets in land, labour and capital that characterised the medieval economy was also closely bound up with the law. 

Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen.

The manor court

Some of the most important research on this theme focuses on one remarkable and important setting: the manor court. Much of the pioneering work on the manor court as a legal institution was carried out by Campop’s former Director, Richard Smith, and his students. A previous blog has introduced the records of the manor court, the manorial court rolls. These sources record the proceedings of individual manor courts, of which thousands existed across medieval England. These courts were attended by tenants of the manor, many of them the unfree peasants (villeins) who held land in tenure from the manorial lord in exchange for labour services and other obligations befitting their status. 

On one view, the manor court was a tribunal held by the lord, for the lord. As such, it protected his interests above all. Its law was the ‘customary law’ of the manor, and was peculiar to that place. Looked at in this way, the world of the manor courts was completely separate from that of other ‘higher’ kinds of law court that existed in medieval England, above all the king’s courts.  

The king’s courts had emerged in the second half of the 12th century under King Henry II. Where the manor courts observed ‘customary law’, the king’s courts observed the ‘common law’. The procedures of the developing common law, especially those connected with rights in real property, quickly proved extremely popular with the landowning classes. This led to an expansion in the common law courts, whose jurisdiction covered the entire kingdom. 

The court of the King’s Bench.

One of the major contributions of the work of Smith and others was to show that the courts of common law and the manor courts belonged to the same legal universe, and were not separate. Smith built on existing research which showed that 13th-century manor courts came to use juries and to depend on the written evidence of the court roll, just as the common law courts did. And it has even been argued that the reason why manor courts started to keep written records of their proceedings in the first place (from the 1240s) was in order to compete with the common law courts, and attract people to use their services instead. 

Land

Land was the most important source of income and wealth in pre-modern society. It is natural, therefore, to ask what the manor courts did to protect villein tenants’ rights. In looking at these questions of the law of real property, the research on manor courts done at Campop and elsewhere found abundant evidence of due process, elaborate and precise legal forms, and careful record keeping. 

In disputes about land, the people who established the facts and made decisions about the rules were not the lord or his officials, but local villagers acting as jurors. Villeins were not allowed to use the common law courts to protect their rights in land, and ultimately villein land belonged to the lord and not the tenant. Yet this does not mean that the unfree were consigned to an arbitrary forum in which the landlord invariably decided matters in his own interests. Instead, villein peasants generally enjoyed security of tenure, protection against eviction, and expectation that their heirs would inherit. The manor courts also borrowed and incorporated some legal devices from the common law, which gave tenants added flexibility. 

The development of villein rights in real property and the careful recording of its terms of tenure, meant that people could hold land with confidence and seek to maximize its economic value through its sale or lease. Even though the land belonged to the lord, it was possible to transfer it from one person to another by first surrendering it into the lord’s possession, following which it was granted to the new tenant. This in turn led to the development of a market in villein land, which was already very lively by the later 13th century. Many thousands of such transfers took place on some manors, with all the details written down in the court roll. 

Medieval farming

Another important consequence of the research into the manorial law of real property was to stress the strength of peasant women’s rights in land. Women could inherit villein land, and widows enjoyed extensive rights of dower. Some of the manorial conveyancing procedures that were shared with the common law highlighted women’s property rights. An important example of this is the jointure, in which property was held by a joint tenancy during the lives of the partners, and by the survivor alone after the death of the other partner. 

Other kinds of property and obligations 

The manor court was not only an institution for the conveyancing of land and for resolving disputes about land rights and ownership. It was also a setting for the hearing of lawsuits about movable goods, broken obligations, and forcible wrongs. Thus alongside the ‘real actions’ about land and buildings, the manor courts heard countless ‘personal actions’ of debt, trespass, and broken agreement, most of them involving peasants.  

This was business that did not directly involve the lord’s interests, though it did provide him with income in court fines. Yet it brought great benefits to the local populace by promoting security of property rights and contract enforcement. It helped stimulate the use of credit, and to create a safe environment in which peasants could invest with confidence in flocks, herds and buildings. At the same time, one must wonder at the potential social costs of such high volumes of interpersonal litigation. 

The personal actions again saw the manor courts borrowing practices and principles from the common law courts. Interestingly, given what has been said above about rights in land, the manorial personal actions highlight disabilities in the position of women before the law. These derived from the doctrine of coverture, which said that married women had no right to form contracts, or to sue and be sued in their own right. Widespread knowledge of and appeal to this common law doctrine can be documented from cases in the manor court rolls. 

The importance of law

In order to pursue the medieval history of family, social structure, inheritance and landholding, it really helps to be something of an amateur legal historian, too. The tradition which connects these subjects is reflected in the subtitle of the journal Continuity and Change, founded in 1986, and long associated with Campop: ‘a journal of social structure, law and demography in past societies’. 

Research on the manor court as a key institution of medieval rural society has continued in recent years, most notably in the work of Spike Gibbs on manorial officeholding. Gibbs’s research and that of others has also looked further at the interactions between manor courts and other types of law courts. It has also aimed to give greater attention to areas beyond eastern England which dominated many of the earlier discussions of manorial law and the land market. 

Given the legal complexity of much of what was going on in even the humblest of manor courts by c.1300, it is natural to be curious about the role of lawyers at village level, and the relative importance of lay and specialist legal knowledge. Some work has been done on this subject, but there is scope for more. 

Pieter Brueghel II, Village Lawyer. Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.

Campop has also been the setting for comparative work which considers the differences and similarities between medieval England and other serf societies. The work of Tracy Dennison on Russia is the prime example of this, and a flavour of its findings can be gleaned from her post in this series. 

To sum up: the work of Campop has been significant in demonstrating the intense and distinctive law-mindedness and familiarity with courts that characterised the entirety of medieval English society, and not only its elite elements. Law was something that even the less well-off in society could use for their own benefit – it was not simply something that was done to them, as the stereotypes would suggest.  

Further Reading 

• Briggs, C., and Schofield, P. R., ‘The evolution of manor courts in medieval England, c.1250-1350: the evidence of the personal actions’, Journal of Legal History, 41 (2020), 1-28. 
• Dennison, T. K., ‘The institutional context of serfdom in England and Russia’, in C. Briggs, P. M. Kitson and S. J. Thompson (eds.), Population, welfare and economic change in Britain, 1290-1834 (Woodbridge, 2014), 249-68. 
• Gibbs, S., Lordship, state formation and local authority in late medieval and early modern England (Cambridge, 2023) 
• Poos, L. R., and Bonfield, L. (eds.), Select cases in manorial courts 1250-1550. Property and family law (Selden Society, vol. 114, London, 1998). 
• Smith, R. M., ‘The English peasantry, 1250-1650’, in T. Scott (ed.), The peasantries of Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries (London and New York, 1998), 339-71. 

Tags: English peasants, law, legal history, medieval, medieval history, middle ages, property

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