sheriff of Northampton was accused in 1302 of making ‘a confederacy
with several others of the county’, a group ‘afterwards called “the com-
pany of the pouch” ’, that ‘some of them would indict persons, and the
others save them, for bribes, according as the same sheriff would
arrange the panels [of jurymen]’.^266 In 1305 the first justices of trail-
baston were instructed to try felonies committed back to 1297 with the
normal severity while hearing indictments of ‘light and personal tres-
passes’ at the suit of the aggrieved persons and binding the trespassers
over to behave peacefully thenceforward. Between these two extremes,
the enormous trespasses of all those found guilty before them of ‘beat-
ing, wounding and maltreating many in the realm placed on juries,
recognitions and assizes because they told the truth’ and of assaulting
others ‘in fairs, markets and other places of common resort [locis
communibus] out of enmity, envy and malice aforethought’, they were
to investigate especially, at the king’s suit whether or not a private com-
plainant sued. They were to punish also those found to have hired such
trespassers, and those who used their power and lordship to take people
under their protection and advocacy for money’ (i.e. run protection
rackets).^267
The trailbaston justices quickly discovered that their own inquiries
were obstructed ‘by the procurement and alliances of the people of the
country’, who concealed all ‘great matters from them’. The response to
the Yorkshire justices’ complaint to the king that their commission (‘of
which we send you a copy’) did not cover such conspiracies was the first
definition of a crime by parliamentary ordinance: conspirators were said
to be those who bound themselves by agreement ‘falsely and malicious-
ly to indict or acquit men’ and ‘such as retain men in the country with
liveries or fees to maintain their malicious enterprises’.^268 But parliament
vacillated in the later middle ages between condemnation of conspira-
tors and anxiety lest honest men should be taken as such when they
were only trying to do their duty, for it was quickly realized that the
threat of an accusation of conspiracy was the best way to coerce a jury.
The parliament of 1393 was still complaining of evil-doers indicted by
honest men and then acquitted by corrupt trial juries, who promptly
brought writs of conspiracy against their indictors in foreign counties: if
jurymen were frightened from telling the truth, it would be to the ‘very
great destruction of the enforcement of the law of the realm’.^269
248 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^266) Britton, 2 vols, ed. and tr. F. M. Nichols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1865), i. 95 n.
(^267) Harding, ‘Early trailbaston proceedings’, 144–5; H. M. Cam, Studies in the Hundred
Rolls, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. P. Vinogradoff, 6 (1921), 73–9; 95; RP
i. 178.
(^268) RPi. 183b; SRi. 216; EHDiii. 519–22; Harding, ‘Early trailbaston proceedings’,
148–9, 164; id., ‘The Origins of the Crime of Conspiracy’, 98–9.
(^269) RPi. 289a, 299a, 371 (no. 5), ii. 11a, 65a, 137a, 166, 259b, iii. 42–3, 83b, 306a;