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Trials in manorial courts in late medieval England

A legal historian approaching the history of the manorial courts is aware that the comprehensive literature of the manor has been primarily concerned with the social, economic or political significance of the manor court. The rolls have been a rich source of research into the nature of medieval society, including questions of personal status, family structures, lordship, demography and social relationships, as well as the practice of agriculture and land management in the medieval English countryside. For a lawyer, the study of legal institutions in themselves is a legitimate field of research, although this cannot and should not be divorced from that of the society in which they operated. Maitland himself, having a deep knowledge and understanding of the law and the instincts and skills of a historian, provided a fundamental analysis of the constitution and procedures of manorial courts in his seminal volume for the Selden Society 1889. Here he affirmed the intrinsic legal importance of the courts and, in particular, stressed the significance of their procedure, since ‘[w]e cannot form a true notion of them unless we know how they did their ordinary work, and this we cannot know until we have mastered their common forms’. It was nearly a century later that legal historians, notably John Beckerman and, more recently, L. R. Poos and Lloyd Bonfield restored the purely legal aspects of the court rolls to the study of legal history. The vast range of manorial court records presents a daunting challenge to the would-be researcher. The primary sources for the manorial courts are manorial documents, consisting of account rolls, extents (surveys for valuation of the property of manors) and especially court rolls and court books. The earliest extant manorial rolls date from the thirteenth century and at that stage the accounts of trial provide considerable detail. By the fourteenth century the stewards of manors were professional lawyers and it is no accident that, with the increasing professionalisation of these officials, the manorial court rolls became less informative and more formulaic. There are, nonetheless,