English Peasants and the Provision of Civil Justice 1275-1400
This three-year postdoctoral research project is funded by the British Academy, and the principal investigator is Chris Briggs. It aims to find out what legal jurisdictions were used 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 helped 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.
The first phase of the project has established the restrictions at the local level placed upon the villager wishing to sue beyond the 'home' manor court, specifically those associated with landlord control and the disabilities of tenurial and personal unfreedom, or 'villeinage'. The project's second phase tracks 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.
The principal investigator is also completing a related project on rural credit in medieval England.