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we can to explore in a little more detail cases involving relatively large sums of capital of this kind and consider the implications of such cases for the wider context of credit extension and debt litigation in the medieval village in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth century.
As already discussed, individual litigants, estate officials and attorneys, could have significant influence upon the nature and process of litigation conducted in the manor court, especially during a period when the manorial court as a jurisdictional entity was evolving and at the same time as were common law courts. Just as in other periods, when lords were prepared to respond to external influence and to adjust their modes of dealing accordingly, so we can see lords in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth century allowing their courts to be moulded to suit the needs to litigants and, especially, wealthy and relatively powerful litigants capable of dealing in relatively large sums of money. We can test this proposition further here by consider the introduction of external forms of dealing at law into the manor court.
Much that passed as litigation in the manor courts of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries responded to patterns and developments also evident in common law courts of the same period. So, for instance, the appearance and development of discrete forms of action, insistence on correct pleading, rules as to the use of particular proofs and so on, responded to and reflected, sometimes with a degree of local colour, conventions and forms also evident in the emergent case law in central common law courts. There remains much potential work to be done in exploring the chronology as well as the direction of flow in such relationships; the assumption is, and it is implicit in much that is written here, that legal development commenced in central courts and was subsequently adopted, sometimes in suitably modified form, in local and seignueurial courts; while this is most likely to have been the case, it is also possible to suggest movement in the opposite direction, an emerging process of law finding favour in local courts before transferring to more central courts. In the final part of this discussion, as an example of transmission of law into the manor court, we can consider the ways in which external plaintiffs and creditors often brought their own expectations of law and process into the manor court and, most especially, sought to apply merchant law, lex mercatoria, within the private jurisdiction of the seigneury.
What was lex mercatoria c. 1300? As is reasonably well known, merchant law was a growing corpus of laws and conventions a main thrust of which was to permit dealing between merchants to be conducted both with relative speed and a good degree of confidence. As James Davis writes, lex mercatoria was «important in defining sales, the procedures of debt litigation and the nature of contractual obligations».37 One important feature of the developing merchant law in this period was the ambition to prevent debtor-defendants from slowing recovery and especially by using compurgation in order to deny their obligation. The principle behind this was clearly that plaintiff-creditors needed the facility to recover obligations efficiently, the beneficial consequence of which was that capital was returned with relative speed to them and thereby into commerce. In order, for instance, to avoid a lengthy process, a creditor seeking repayment under merchant law could use a recognised formula in his pleading in order to effect a speedy recovery. Thus, later thirteenth and early fourteenth-century custumals from Ipswich (Suffolk) and Norwich (Norfolk) state clearly the obligation upon defendant-debtors to dispense with a defence founded upon compurgation should the plaintiff claim that the original contract had been agreed in a market in the presence of witnesses.38 These kinds of convention were on occasion carried into the manor court.
In certain instances, it is quite clear that the plaintiff is an external agent, familiar with merchant law and able to apply it in the manor court. So, for instance, at Walsham le Willows in 1321 the defendant was pursued in the manor court there on account of a contract established in 1319 at Ipswich through which the defendant was to render regular accounts relating to the money lent, and this was to be done according to merchant law and a written agreement between the parties. The defendant acknowledged the debt without defence.39 In three separate cases at Great Barton in 1316 the same plaintiff, Stephen de Haukedon pursued three different individuals for the recovery of large sums of grain, the first of which was proved by sealed tally; in only one of the three cases, the last and the most poorly preserved, did the defendant seek to defend himself, possibly again suggesting that de Haukedon was a wealthy external agent able to bring the force of merchant law into the manor court.40 More explicitly, a defendant at Horsham St Faith (Norfolk) was distrained to answer a claim that he had bought iron at Norwich, the sum for which was to repaid at the local market (nundine) at Horsham; as the defendant had failed to pay the debt, the plaintiff sought recovery by offering to show his tally accordingly to law merchant. The defendant, faced with this proof, acknowledged the debt.41 Such instances suggest that, within the manor court, the force of merchant law was clearly recognised and that defences, notably compurgation, were recognised to be weak or inadmissible defences in certain compelling circumstances.
This kind of external influence upon the development of law and, over time, the kinds of tactical and procedural approaches developed in the manor court requires further investigation. While there is plentiful evidence that defendants remained committed to compurgation as an effective defence in most instances, they clearly needed to be wary of its limits especially when confronted by a combination of proof in the form of tally or other written instrument, as well as witness proof including attesting a prior contract entered into at a market or market town. Further research in this area might, for instance, consider the possibility that peasant litigants introduced such devices into their own pleading, not the least of which would be reference to contracts established within a market location. It is also worth noting that, in so far as can be gleaned to date from an examination of debt litigation recorded in court rolls from western and eastern England in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, references to merchant law are relatively common in the eastern England sample but far less evident in western England. It is likely that a combination of factors, including proximity to a number of significant commercial centres in which merchant law was, as we have seen in the above references to its codification at Norwich and Ipswich, frequently employed and a commercialised regional economy in which economic interaction between towns and their hinterlands were commonplace, help explain the greater tendency for merchant law to reach into manorial courts in eastern England. Such regional features of legal development add to our sense of a developing law in manorial courts which, while in many respects strikingly uniform, also displays nuance and subtle distinctions.42
1 Elaine Clark: «Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval English Vill», in James Ambrose Raftis (ed.): Pathways to Medieval Peasants, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981.
2 See, for example, Chris Briggs, Credit and village society in fourteenth-century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009; idem: «Manor court procedures, debt litigation levels, and rural credit provision in England, c. 1290-c. 1380», Law and History Review, 24 (2006), pp. 519-558; Phillipp R. Schofield: «Dearth, debt and the local land market in a late thirteenth century Suffolk village», Agricultural History Review, 45, part 1, (1997), pp. 1-17; idem: «L’endettement et le crédit dans la campagne anglaise au moyen âge», in Maurice Berthe (ed.): Endettement paysan et crédit rural dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne. Actes des XVIIes journées internationales d’histoire de l’abbaye de Flaran, Septembre 1995, Toulouse, Mirail, 1998, pp. 69-97; idem: «Access to credit in the medieval English countryside», in Phillipp R. Schofield & Nicholas J. Mayhew (ed.): Credit and debt in medieval England, Oxford, Oxbow, 2002, pp. 106-126; idem: «Credit and debt in the medieval English countryside», in