Manor Court Procedures, Debt Litigation Levels, and Rural Credit Provision in England, c.1290—c.1380

Datos Bibliográficos

ID22924969
AutoresCharles Briggs (0009-0003-3640-7750), Chris Briggs (0000-0002-1470-9358, autor de correspondencia)
Año2006
Volumen24
Número3
Páginas519-558
Fecha de publicación2006-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLaw and History Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0738-2480 • E-ISSN: 1939-9022
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0738248000000791
OpenAlexW2167702737
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas19
Referencias citadas51

In the last two decades or so, questions of law have moved back to the top of the research agenda in work on medieval English manor courts. This marks a shift away from the 1960s to the mid-1980s, when the historians on both sides of the Atlantic who established the court roll as the pre-eminent source for everyday life in the countryside sought inspiration from the social sciences rather than legal history. The court roll studies published in that period generated much methodological debate about use of these records to study peasants and their communities. Nonetheless, in most of those studies, consideration of the manor court as a legal forum first and foremost, or of the implications of reliance on a legal source to study social and economic history, was secondary to analysis of the data in the rolls. More recently, though, scholars have started once again to look at the court roll from the perspective adopted by Maitland in his Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seigniorial Courts . These historians are concerned with defining and characterizing “customary law”: that is, with the nature and principles of the law applied in manor courts; the extent to which those principles were malleable or unchanging; the relationship between the rulings pronounced in the manor courts and those recorded in other areas of the legal system, most importantly the common law courts; and the machinery of manor courts with respect to procedures, personnel, and record keeping.

Business · Common law · Debt · Legal history · Political science · Sociology · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law · Medieval and Early Modern Justice · Medieval Literature and History