the people so retained in their quarrels with their neighbours and the
corruption of legal processes by violence and by bribery. The Commons
complained in 1406 that despite the statute bannerets, knights and
esquires every day gave ‘liveries of cloth, one to 300 serving men, one
to two hundred, another to a lesser number, another to a greater, to
sustain their extortionate quarrels’, and that no remedy could be got for
the homicides, robberies, rapes of women, and other injuries committed
under colour of livery because of the confederacy, alliances, and main-
tenance among the companies.^262
The definition of a crime of conspiracy shows best of all the nature of
disorder in late medieval England and how the sense of personal wrong
merged into a conception of communal harm and public responsibility.
Charlemagne had laid down punishments for conspirators, even ‘where
nothing was put in execution’ (ubi nihil mali perpetratum fuit), drawing
on a tradition of ecclesiastical legislation which set penalties for clerks
‘making sworn compacts or conspiring’ (coniurantes aut conspirantes)
against their bishop or superior in religion.^263 But the wrong was first
singled out in English law in an instruction to the justices in eyre, with-
in a few months of the order of 1278 to hear querelaeof trespass from
all-comers, to inquire further of ‘confederates and conspirators’ who
bound themselves by oath to support their friends in assizes, jury-trials,
and recognitions, and confound their enemies. The temptation to invent
or embellish the bill of complaint, and to corrupt the jury which had to
pronounce on its worth, was irresistible, and a jury persuaded to swear
falsely in a private interest fitted the concept of an illicit conjuration
exactly. An ordinance of 1293 provided a writ for use against people
who conspired to bring false law-suits and win them by influencing
juries, which was followed by a series of cases of ‘conspiracy and
trespass’ in king’s bench.^264
The root meaning of conspiracy in England was thus a concerted sub-
version of the processes of law, which threatened public order even
more fundamentally when it was criminal indictments that com-
plainants, sheriffs, justices, and juries were implicated in falsifying. The
corruption of legal and administrative procedures had grown as the pro-
cedures grew. In articles added to Magna Carta in 1300, Edward I
reached the point of ordering his justices to award inquests without writ
to complainants of ‘conspirators, false informers, and evil procurers of
dozens, assizes, inquests and juries’, and anyone was invited to sue for
the king against royal ministers suspected of ‘maintaining’ pleas.^265 The
Law of injuries and public peace 247(^262) SRii. 74–5; EHD1116–17.
(^263) Capitularia Regum Francorum, i. 124 (10).
(^264) Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ii, pp. cxli–cxlii, 168, iii, pp. liv–lxxi; RPi. 96.
(^265) A. Harding, ‘The Origins of the Crime of Conspiracy’, TRHS, 5th ser. 33 (1983), 94–7;
Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, i. 76; SR139; EHDiii. 499 (cc. 9, 10).