Conspiracy was the first crime to be defined in parliament because it
perverted the means of communication between the people and their
king by bills of complaint and the whole system of justice they
supported. A world of local chieftains ruling by force and patronage,
and in the west and north of England possessing their own ‘serjeants of
the peace’, was not easily changed into one of justices exercising an
acknowledged and responsible public authority: the landlords’ use of
judicial commissions as a weapon in local disputes was at the heart
of the ‘lack of governance’ in late medieval England.^270 Yet a measure
of public order was imposed on the mass of the people by the repeated
renewal at the instance of the Commons of a group of statutes ‘for tran-
quillity, peace and quiet within the realm’: the Statutes of Winchester
(1285) and Northampton (1328) which were the foundation of the
authority of the JPs, and others concerning livery and maintenance,
weights and measures, and servants, labourers, and vagabonds.^271
Parliaments were often said to be summoned to discuss how the peace
should be preserved in every place, and at them prelates, lords temporal,
and commons might take a solemn oath ‘to guard the good peace, quiet
and tranquillity in the realm’, the churchmen at the same time pro-
nouncing a sentence of excommunication on all who broke it.^272 Main
functions of the king’s council were to supervise the local justices and,
sitting in Star Chamber, to punish ‘great riots and unlawful assemblies’
beyond the JPs’ power to suppress—acting once again on bills of com-
plaint and using its ability to order the imprisonment and imposition of
huge fines on any in the land ‘as their estates and the quantity of their
trespass’ demanded.^273
The category of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘confederacy’ was extended from
the subversion of legal processes to the political machinations of town
oligarchies and the commercial chicanery of merchants and gildsmen,
and then to the ‘alliances and covins... congregations, chapters and
ordinances’ of villeins challenging their conditions of tenure and work-
men who resisted the labour laws, and ‘the oaths taken between them
or to be taken in the future’. In 1425 the Commons petitioned against
‘the chapters and assemblies’ of masons in contravention of the Statute
Law of injuries and public peace 249Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, ed.
Putnam, 69, 72, 74, 79, 386, 408, 478–9, for a variety of cases of conspiracy heard by the JPs
themselves.
(^270) R. Stewart-Brown, The Serjeants of the Peace in Medieval England and Wales
(Manchester UP, 1936); Harding, Law Courts of Medieval England, 90 ff.
(^271) SRi. 276–8, 364–5, 374, ii. 509; RPii. 166b (no. 14), 257–8, 271b (no. 28); iii. 23 (92),
42–3, 82 (36), 158 (29), 268–9 (38); vi. 8, 198b (10); EHDiii. 460–2; EHDiv. 533 ff.
(^272) RPii. 64b, 103a, 158a, 200a, 225b, 237a; iii. 71a, 99b, 252a (48), 284a, 300a, 309a,
iv. 15b, 106b, 150a, 169b, 197b, 495b.
(^273) Harding, The Law Courts of Medieval England,105–6.