English Law Courts in the Later Middle Ages

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-124
Author(s):  
Alan Harding
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Law ◽  
Law Courts

Towards an Ideology of the Early English Law of Obligations

1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 505-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morris S. Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Functional Consequences ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Government ◽  
To Come ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
Early English

So portentous a title as I have contrived for tonight's lecture ought to come furnished with an appropriately bombastic beginning. In fact, it does not. Instead of concentrating on a beginning, I thought that we might more profitably focus our attention on the beginning, that is, on a time long before the sophisticated legal/administrative system of England's high middle ages had evolved. It will be interesting to get what peeks we can at the jurisprudential assumptions of, say, preconquest Englishmen. As Tom Green has recently demonstrated in his book on the criminal jury, these assumptions could exhibit a durability that had functional consequences for many centuries. If through the jury they could prevail against contrary official versions of what the substantive law was, as Green has shown, how much more potent could they be when the government was not inclined to oppose their effectuation?

The native Irish and English law in medieval Ireland

1950 ◽  
Vol 7 (25) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jocelyn Otway-Ruthven
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Local Administration ◽  
Norman Conquest ◽  
English Law ◽  
To Come ◽  
Short Time ◽  
Medieval Ireland ◽  
The Middle Ages

The problems set by the Norman conquest of Ireland which began under Henry II cannot be properly appreciated if they are viewed in isolation. Similar problems had been set by the Norman conquest of England only a hundred years earlier; similar problems existed in Wales. In England, however, the conquest had been both rapid and complete, and problems which were to last throughout the middle ages in Ireland were solved in England by the merging of the two peoples in a relatively short time. Moreover, in England no such clash of laws as was to come about in Ireland had followed the conquest: the Anglo-Saxons had possessed a well-developed system of local administration which was taken over with little or no modification by the Norman kings.

The art of alibi: English law courts and the novel

2002 ◽  
Vol 40 (02) ◽  
pp. 40-0756-40-0756
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
English Law ◽  
Law Courts

From England to France

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Chester Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Corporal Punishment ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Hundred Years War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
English Law ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Middle Ages

At the height of the Middle Ages, a peculiar system of perpetual exile— or abjuration—flourished in western Europe. It was a judicial form of exile, not political or religious, and it was meted out to felons for crimes deserving of severe corporal punishment or death. This book explores the lives of these men and women who were condemned to abjure the English realm, and draws on their unique experiences to shed light on a medieval legal tradition until now very poorly understood. The book weaves an historical tapestry, examining the judicial and administrative processes that led to the abjuration of more than seventy-five thousand English subjects, and recounting the astonishing journeys of the exiles themselves. Some were innocents caught up in tragic circumstances, but many were hardened criminals. Almost every English exile departed from the port of Dover, many bound for the same French village, a place called Wissant. The book vividly describes what happened when the felons got there, and tells the stories of the few who managed to return to England, either illegally or through pardons. The book provides new insights into a fundamental pillar of medieval English law and shows how it collapsed amid the bloodshed of the Hundred Years' War.

scholarly journals XXII.—Some Historical Aspects of the English Law of Attainder and Forfeiture for High Treason

Archaeologia ◽  
1883 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 409-428
Author(s):  
Alfred Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Historical Aspects ◽  
Wars Of The Roses ◽  
History Of ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Middle Ages

A knowledge of the working of the English Law of Attainder and Forfeiture for High Treason is essential to a proper understanding of the History of England in the Middle Ages, especially during the period of the Wars of the Roses.Perhaps the working of the law can be shown best in individual cases. Let us select as examples the fortunes of the dignities and estates which but for forfeiture and other intervening circumstances would have centred in the ill-fated Edward Earl of Warwick, last male scion of the splendid House of Plantagenet.

The Church and the Two Nations in Late Medieval Armagh (Presidential Address)

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Watt
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
English Law ◽  
Satisfactory Answer ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Medieval Ireland ◽  
The Church

Perhaps I can best introduce my paper, explain its nature and state my objective in writing it, by describing it as another step towards completing the second part of a study of which my book The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland was the first part.’ The study which concluded with the Statute of Kilkenny of 1366 needs extending chronologically by at least a century. More importantly, the nature of the analysis itself needs to be deepened. The ‘Two Nations’ book began with asking a fairly simple and limited question: what was the relationship of the ecclesiastical and civil powers within the English-settled parts of Ireland—in short, English law and the Irish Church. But it ended raising a more complex and more fundamental question about the overall effects on the Church of the establishment in Ireland of an English colony which was not coterminous with the country as a whole and whose strength and influence declined in the later middle ages. There may have been a more or less satisfactory answer in the book to the restricted question. There was, at best, no more than a tentative beginning to an answer to the more fundamental one.

Outside the Law in the Middle Ages

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-54
Author(s):  
Conor McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Sovereign Authority ◽  
English Law ◽  
Legal Sense ◽  
The Middle Ages

This chapter begins by looking at what outlawry means in a legal sense in medieval England, drawing comparisons between the characterisation of the outlaw as an excluded figure and Agamben's portrayal of the homo sacer. The representation of the outlaw in the literature of the period, however, gives us a very different picture, akin to Hobsbawm's 'social bandit.' Different again from these representations in both legal and literary texts are the actions of the real outlaw gangs of medieval England, whose behaviour is perhaps more complex than either Agamben or Hobsbawm's archetypal constructions may allow for. Following this discussion of the outlaw in legal, literary, and historical texts, this chapter proceeds to highlight three phenomena. Firstly, it notes the extent of additional forms of exclusion from law within the 'palimpsest of jurisdictions' found in later medieval England. Secondly, it discusses outlawry and its literature as a location where tensions around sovereign authority may be examined. Finally, it considers the use of exclusion from or inclusion within English law as a tactic linked to territorial expansion in later medieval Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and the application of outlawry to the English state’s archipelagic opponents, such as Robert Bruce and William Wallace.

Urban Legal Culture

Law in Common ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 55-85
Author(s):  
Tom Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Consumer Choice ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Spatial Regulation ◽  
Physical Shape ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
The City

This chapter argues that the density of law-courts deeply conditioned the way in which townspeople engaged with legal institutions in late-medieval towns. The proximity of so many legal institutions may have made it easier for townspeople to sue in the jurisdiction best suited to their litigation; but more important than any putative consumer choice were the implications of institutional density on legal authority, as it both intensified governance and opened up the possibility of its challenge. As townspeople used different urban law-courts, they helped to constitute jurisdiction in the city, routinely drawing into the relations—sometimes conflictual, sometimes cooperative, and sometimes uneasy—between different authorities. The concerns of different urban authorities with jurisdiction over space, moreover, aligned closely with those of townspeople themselves; the denser concentrations of people in towns and cities, and the changing physical shape of cities in the later Middle Ages, meant that workable arrangements for living close together had to be continually renegotiated. As such, associative relations in urban legal culture were frequently conceived in terms of spatial regulation.

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