pro seipsis). Private initiative was needed especially to uncover the sorts
of official abuse that had been itemized by the articles of the eyre and
the corruption of royal ministers, from the chancellor downwards, that
had been stigmatized in Edward I’s statutes.^258 Laws to protect English
money and commercial interests also created misdemeanours from
which informers could profit: a person who ‘espied’ and proved an
offence was assured pour son travailof a third of the penalty imposed
on English merchants for shipping goods in foreign vessels, on alnergers
who allowed defective cloth to be sold, and on gilders of metal other
than silver (except to embellish the ornaments of holy church); and took
a half of the goods confiscated from exporters of corn, victuals, and
arms to Scotland. Statutes of the 1420s gave informers third or fourth
parts of the goods forfeited by ‘trespassers’ evading the customs on
wool, bypassing the staple port of Calais, or carrying silver out of the
realm other than to pay the king’s soldiers. An act of Henry VIII in the
sixteenth century gave half the penalty for exporting brass or bell metal
overseas to ‘the party that will sue for the same by writ, bill, plaint or
information’.^259
While the law of treason, as narrowly defined by the Statute of
Treasons of 1352, dealt with the personal betrayal of king or bishop,
and of a husband by his wife,^260 the category of ‘enormous trespasses’
embraced a whole range of threats to the order and integrity of the
commonwealth. By use of it ‘for the conservation of his peace and the
quiet of his people’ which his coronation oath bound him to, the king
attempted to restrain the casual violence of the lords.^261 The more
organized violence of overmighty subjects was attacked by statutes such
as that of 1390 forbidding lords to grant badges (‘signs’), ‘fees, robes
and other liveries called liveries of company’ (effectively uniforms) to
anyone except retainers for life and family servants living in the house-
hold: offenders against which the Commons asked more than once
should be prosecuted by ‘indictment or inquest, and by bill or writ’ both
before royal judges and before local justices proceeding ‘in like manner
and form... as is by your Justices of peace usually used, of trespass
done with force and arms against your peace’. The giving of liveries was
so dangerous to public order because it went with the ‘maintenance’ of
246 Legal Ordering of ‘the State of the Realm’
(^258) Roll of the Shropshire Eyre, p. lviii; ‘Early trailbaston proceedings from the Lincoln roll
of 1305’, ed. A. Harding, in Medieval Legal Records edited in memory of C. A. F. Meekings,
ed. R. F. Hunnisett and J. B. Post (London: HMSO, 1978), 150; Statutes of Westminster I,
caps. 24–33, and II, caps. 36, 49, for which see EHDiii. 404–6, 449, 457; Select Cases in the
Court of King’s Bench, v. 49; RP ii. 167–8 (no. 24), 269b (no. 12), 296 (no. 18).
(^259) SRi. 270, 372 (c. 3), ii. 18, 34, 164–5, 203, 219, 224, 228, 283, 332, 337, 453, iii. 83.
(^260) Ibid. i .319; EHDiv. 403.
(^261) RPi. 355a (no. 7); ii. 165a (no. 6), 305b; iii. 23a, 120, 159a, 265b, 307a, 477–8, 600,
626b, 645a, 662; iv. 14b, 126b, 252a (41–2), 256b, 294a, 333a, 351b, 359a, 410a, 450–1; v.
28a, 108, 111a, 393a, 397a; vi. 184a, 185, 188–9.