British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 2006
26 April 2006
Abstracts
Dr Christopher Briggs
English Peasants and the Provision of Civil Justice, c.1275-c.1400
My British Academy postdoctoral fellowship project is concerned with finding out what happened when one fourteenth-century villager sued another in a private dispute concerning a debt, trespass or broken agreement. More specifically, how often and in what circumstances did the plaintiff choose to sue not in the local manor court situated in his or her home village, but to opt instead to go further afield to seek justice in an alternative jurisdiction, such as, perhaps, a church court, or one of the king’s courts?
This question matters for several reasons. Most importantly, the ability to travel outside one’s home village to pursue civil litigation of this kind was crucial to the functioning of the rural economy, since it made it possible to guarantee the enforcement of agreements between peasants living in different places. Measuring peasant use of royal civil justice is also crucial in tracing English ‘state formation’, a vital stage of which involved the emergence of a unified legal system catering to the needs of the majority of the population, rather than just to social elites. Investigating preparedness to engage in potentially alien institutions outside the village also sheds light on the mentality and culture of members of rural communities.
In this talk, I present findings from the first phase of my project, which establishes the restrictions at the local level placed upon the villager wishing to sue beyond the ‘home’ manor court, specifically those associated with lordly control and the disabilities of tenurial and personal unfreedom, or villeinage. I then describe the findings to date of the project’s second phase, in which I track down bona fide villagers engaging in civil litigation outside their ‘home’ manors, whether in church courts, royal courts, and the courts of manorial lords other than their own.
Dr Christopher Briggs completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2002. He has been a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge (2000-2004) and is currently a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.