Fourteenth-Century Promises
1976 ◽
Vol 35
(2)
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pp. 321-334
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Keyword(s):
We are all familiar with the paradox that while medieval English society set great store in promises and their performance, the law of its central courts paid them little attention. The marital arrangement, which could be undone only rarely; the system we have learned to call feudalism, infidelity to which was sometimes called felony; the heavy emphasis in medieval literature on keeping faith: all these support the proposition that an important tenet of medieval morality was that promises ought to be kept. Yet the common law of promises was curiously retarded, thus creating what seems an odd gap between law and morality.