Medieval Law and the Foundations of the State

all the wealth of the realm is consumed and brought to nothing’, and marked off a wider range of estates than had Philip the Fai ...

every county whom he might order sheriffs to see elected along with two burgesses from each of the larger towns. (The knights an ...

of placing a check on the king’s fiscal demands. Entry to this privileged estate could be gained by purchasing a royal lettre d’ ...

specific licence.^209 The barons petitioned Edward II in 1325 that the rule should not apply to lands they acquired within honou ...

Septuagesima and in Lent’. These chapters and the many strengthening legal process in Westminster II are of a similar sort to th ...

holder of it should therefore be liable to an action for waste if he ran it down. The sum of a landowner’s various interests in ...

which (according to the harangue of Sir Philip de Poitiers at the Estates- General at Tours in 1484) was to pray for, counsel, a ...

and the English statute of mortmain of 1279 (this latter anticipated by a baronial provision of 1259) forbade new alienations of ...

the lay nobility, the Commons embracing the lesser landlords along with the burgesses but without permanent clerical representat ...

liberty and defence’, not only of his realm of France but also of ecclesiastical persons, ‘li generaux estats de l’Eglise’ and t ...

realm’. Acts of vengeance against any persons were forbidden, so long as the king’s enemies were within the realm, and lords who ...

Beaumanoir makes actionable all injuries to persons or property by force, threat of force, or fraud. Prosecution by appeal and t ...

the appellee, as the appellant was required to do, was an unattractive way of seeking revenge for any but the most serious felon ...

instance, an innkeeper might be summoned to show why, whereas (cum) by the custom of England he had a duty to look after his gue ...

The justice which the gentry began to administer in late medieval England as the king’s agents was recognizably a public crimina ...

pro seipsis). Private initiative was needed especially to uncover the sorts of official abuse that had been itemized by the arti ...

the people so retained in their quarrels with their neighbours and the corruption of legal processes by violence and by bribery. ...

sheriff of Northampton was accused in 1302 of making ‘a confederacy with several others of the county’, a group ‘afterwards call ...

Conspiracy was the first crime to be defined in parliament because it perverted the means of communication between the people an ...

of Labourers, and the JPs were now empowered to treat as felons at least those who called such assemblies, but only to imprison ...