Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State

Property and liberty The land law did more than establish hierarchies of wealth. Along with the ownership of land, the actaof me ...

resources to fulfil. This ‘liberty’ was the inviolability of a prelate’s or baron’s lands, so that libertascould signify both th ...

Wulfstan of Worcester recovered the possessions of his church ‘endowed with the same liberty with which its first founders [the ...

barons holding free lands in the county (not villeins or base or poor persons), and that a person ‘so advanced in personal freed ...

towards their men ‘the points of the charters of franchises’ which they themselves had been granted by the king, and also to res ...

his heirs.^125 Another prior had his liberty seized because his hanging of the corpse of a cattle thief who had stabbed himself ...

emendi et vendendi secundum leges et consuetudines regni), remained the most familiar of grants throughout the Middle Ages.^131 ...

number and activities of serjeants of the peace, seignorial peace-officers peculiar to the western and northern counties of Engl ...

and water.^143 The French cases bring into focus another important way by which thirteenth-century monarchies changed territoria ...

then those of Vermandois, Orléannais, Touraine, Anjou, and the Beauvaisis.^147 In the latter half of the century, the nobility a ...

confirmed, and as to the protections they sought were informed that the king ‘took all religious men under his protection’ autom ...

‘the three orders’, the clergy, the warriors, and the workers, appears as a widespread concern in the eleventh century. The feud ...

Louis IX all asserted their rulership by measures against this despised and vulnerable minority. In 1180–2 Philip first arrested ...

Though Christian serfs were too scattered to be a self-conscious ‘commonalty’, as the Jews were,^165 their working of the land w ...

labour services (it was the arbitrariness of the demands which distin- guished a villein from a free peasant, who might owe heav ...

by the Black Death on the peasants who survived.^175 In 1377 Richard II was compelled by the gentry to legislate against villein ...

parliament petitioned for a remedy against the labourers who refused to work and migrated to the towns to become artisans, marin ...

reason for instructing everyone from rich merchants to ordinary workers to reduce their prices when he revalued the coinage, and ...

The vital importance of urban wealth to governments compelled the admission of burgesses to the political process. Their represe ...

specified, as also were the fines to be exacted from lords and their ‘subjects... in whatever estate they are in’, for offending ...