British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
BA PDF Symposium 200626 April 2006 AbstractsDr Nicholas KarnLaw and justices in Anglo-Norman EnglandFor the great F. W. Maitland, and for most of his successors as scholars of legal history, English law meant the common law. A common, kingdom-wide law only arose in the later twelfth century, but was preceded by decades of development which fed into it. There has been consideration of some aspects of the content of law in this local, pre-common law phase, but the institutions and officers that managed it have not received serious modern investigation. This paper will be concerned with the manner in which the king interacted with the administration of justice in the shires, where most disputes were settled, in the absence of settled central courts. Here, the key officers were the justices, who have often erroneously been regarded as direct precursors of the later itinerant justices. However, their role can be shown to have been as much an executive one as a judicial one, concerned with managing the king’s interests through shire courts rather than handing down judgements through them. In this role, they parallel the commissioners who operated without title in the time of King William I in the resolution of the most grave property disputes, but who nevertheless had specific and identifiable functions in the shire-based system of law. However, this understanding of the role of justices is based upon the first examination made of the decision-making and judgement-finding processes that shire courts used before the advent of the common law. Dr Nicholas Karn is a British Academy Post-doctoral Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He has recently published English Episcopal Acta 31: Ely, 1109–1197 in the British Academy’s series, and is currently involved in project to edit the acta of Kings William II and Henry I as well as being engaged in completing a monograph on shire government in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
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