Kitabı oku: «El sistema financiero a finales de la Edad Media: instrumentos y métodos», sayfa 8

Non-peasant litigants in debt cases in the manor court

Undoubtedly, a great deal of lending and borrowing at the level of the medieval village took place between villagers and a high proportion of such agreement did not end up as litigation in manorial or other courts. Chris Briggs’ work has illustrated the evident tendency for the majority of credit agreements which led to debt litigation in the manorial court to be small in scale. Briggs’ close investigation of debt cases on five separate manors in the fourteenth century indicates that most debts were less than 5 s. and that, on some manors at least, very small debts which must chiefly have been intended to support consumption rather than investment predominated.³¹

Despite the evidence of large numbers of small debts, it is also strongly evident that a great deal of the capital which was contested in litigation was concentrated in a relatively small number of cases. As Briggs also notes, while even some of the relatively small debts involved quite large sums, if considered in terms of day-to-day expenditures, there were also other debt cases recorded in the manor court cases which involved really quite substantial sums.³² While the typical, but not always consistently applied, limit of 40 s. inevitably contained the extent of debts recorded in the manor court, even debts of 20 s. or more involved, by most contemporary standards, large sums of money.³³

While the number of debt cases involving large sums of money was certainly less than the number of cases in which smaller sums were pursued, it remains the case that, on more than one level, the debt cases in which large sums were contested, were very important. In a previous paper, it has been shown that a simple count of proportions of cases relative to the amount of the debt risks under-representing the significance of cases involving large debts.³⁴ The present author has looked at the range of available published data on debt litigation in English manorial courts and by, for instance, examining the proportion of cases identified by Briggs for the Cambridgeshire manors of Oakington, Dry Drayton and Cottenham in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries has shown that while the proportion of debts worth 5 s. or less on these manors was in excess of 70 per cent, the total value of debts worth 5 s. or less was, by estimation, less than 15 per cent. By contrast, debts to the individual value of 10 s. or more accounted for upwards of 70 per cent of the total value loaned on the three manors while their number accounted for just 17.3 per cent.³⁵ In the first instance, but a point that will be explored less in this paper than elsewhere, the recovery of the larger debts was important in terms of its significance for the extent of available capital operating within particular locales. At Hinderclay (Suffolk) in the second decade of the fourteenth century, for instance, just under 11.5 per cent of all debt cases accounted for a little over 45 per cent of the total capital in litigation in that decade, in other words there was a small number of very large (in terms of the size of debt) cases but that these were highly significant in terms of contested capital.³⁶ In what follows 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 XVII^es 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 Il Mercato della Terra. Secc. XIII-XVIII, Prato, Monash University, 2004, pp. 785-796; idem: «The social economy of the medieval village», Economic History Review, 61 S1 (2008), pp. 38-63.

³ C. Briggs: Credit and village society.

⁴ C. Briggs: Credit and village society; Ph. R. Schofield: «Dearth, debt and the local land market»; Ph. R. Schofield: «Social economy».

⁵ Phillipp R. Schofield: «Dealing in crisis: external credit and the early fourteenth-century English village», in Martin Allen and Matthew Davies (eds): Medieval Merchants and Money: Essays in honour of James L. Bolton, London IHR, 2016, pp. 253-270.

⁶ For a discussion of the historiography of the medieval English peasantry, see Phillipp R. Schofield: Peasants and historians. Debating the medieval English peasantry, Manchester, MUP, 2016. See also Christopher Dyer: «Les Cours Manoriales», Études Rurales, 103-104 (1986), pp. 19-28 and on the appearance of manorial court rolls, Zvi Razi & Richard. M. Smith: «The Origins of the English Manorial Court Rolls as a Written Record: A Puzzle», in Z. Razi & R. M. Smith (ed.): Medieval Society and the Manor Court, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 36-68.

⁷ Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seigneurial Courts, ed. and tr. Frederic W. Maitland, Selden Society, 2, 1889.

⁸ In addition to the works listed above by Chris Briggs and Phillipp R. Schofield (n. 2), an important and earlier contribution was made by John S. Beckerman: «Customary law in English manorial courts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries», unpublished University of London PhD, 1972; the core of his thesis was subsequently published as idem, «Procedural innovation and institutional change in medieval English manorial courts», Law and History Review, 10 (1992), pp. 198-252. Other historians have touched on such issues as part of their wider campaign of research; see especially, Lloyd Bonfield: «The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England», Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXI (1989), pp. 515-534; idem: «What did Edwardian Villagers Mean by «Customary Law»?», in Z. Razi & R. M. Smith (ed.): Medieval Society and the Manor Court, pp. 103-116; John S. Beckerman: «Toward a Theory of Medieval Manorial Adjudication: the Nature of Communal Judgements in a System of Customary Law», Law and History Review, xiii (1995), pp. 1-22; Paul R. Hyams: «What did Edwardian Villagers Understand by Law?», in Z. Razi & R. M. Smith (ed.): Medieval Society and the Manor Court, pp. 69-102. Hyam’s important essay and the themes arising have recently been discussed in Chris Briggs & Phillipp R. Schofield: «Understanding Edwardian villagers’ use of law: some manor court litigation evidence», Reading Medieval Studies, XL (2014) (guest ed. D. Postles), pp. 117-139.

⁹ C. Briggs: Credit and village society; also Ph. R. Schofield: «Dearth, debt and the local land market»; idem: «Credit, crisis and the money supply, c. 1280-c. 1330», in Martin Allen & D’Maris Coffman: Money, Prices and Wages. Essays in Honour of Professor Nicholas Mayhew, Basingstoke / New York, Palgrave, 2015, pp. 94-108.

¹⁰ On which, see, for instance,

¹¹ Phillipp R. Schofield: «Credit and its record in the later medieval English countryside», in Philipp R. Rössner (ed.): Cities – Coins – Commerce. Essays presented to Ian Blanchard on the occasion of his 70^th Birthday, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2012, pp. 77-88.

¹² For court roll-recorded recognizances, see for instance the examples given in Phillipp R. Schofield: «Peasant debt in English manorial courts: form and nature», in Julie-Mayade Claustre (ed.): La Dette et le juge. Juridiction gracieuse et jurisdiction contenieuse du XIII^e au XV^e siècle, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2007, p. 57, and the discussion by C. Briggs: Credit and village society, pp. 79-82 and p. 225 for a further example.

¹³ See, for instance, Ph. R. Schofield: «L’endettement et le credit», p. 81; J. S. Beckerman: «Customary law», p. 286.

¹⁴ See, for instance, some examples offered in C. Briggs: Credit and village society, pp. 224-227. The development of law in the manor court in the period c. 1250-c. 1350 is the subject of the project «Private law and medieval village society: personal actions in manor courts, c. 12501350», funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2006-2009, grant reference AH/ D502713/1; the project team comprised Chris Briggs and Matthew Tompkins as project researchers; Richard Smith was principal investigator, with the present author as co-investigator. A volume arising from the project and edited by Briggs and Schofield will be published by the Selden Society: http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/selden_society/pub.html#avp (last accessed 16 March 2015).

¹⁵ See, in particular, the discussion of these developments in J. S. Beckerman: «Procedural innovation».

¹⁶ C. Briggs: «Manor court procedures».

¹⁷ Phillipp R. Schofield: «Peasants, litigation and agency in medieval England: the development of law in manorial courts in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries», in Janet Burton, Phillipp R. Schofield & Björn Weiler (ed.): Thirteenth-century England XIV, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2013, pp. 15-25.

¹⁸ See, for discussion of this particular point, C. Briggs & Ph. R. Schofield: «Understanding Edwardian villagers’ use of law», pp. 132-135.

¹⁹ For an instance, see Phillipp R. Schofield: «Peasants and the manor court: gossip and litigation in a Suffolk village at the close of the thirteenth century», Past and Present, 159 (1998), pp. 15-16, and especially n. 47.

²⁰ See, for instance, Messing, court of 15 May 1296, Essex Record Office D/DH X1; East and West Hanningfield, court of 28 April 1332, Essex Record Office D/DP M 832; Foxton, court of 7 Oct. 1275, Trinity College, Cambridge Box 27 roll 3.

²¹ Horsham St Faith, court of 31 May 1316, Norfolk Record Office, NRS 19505. For a similar instance, see West Halton, court of 14 July 1315, Westminster Abbey Muniments 14545.

²² Bottisham, court of 14 Aug 1344, The National Archive, SC2/155/49, 29 r. and d.

²³ See, for instance, Bottisham, court of 2 Oct. 1344, The National Archive [hereafter TNA] SC2/155/49, 30r.

²⁴ Ph. R. Schofield: «Peasants, litigation and agency», pp. 22-23.

²⁵ Langdon (Staffs), Staffordshire Record Office D(W)1734/2/1/598, m.1r, courts of 12 January 1328, 18 January 1334, 9 October 1335; noted as bailiff of Norton Canes or Wyrley, court of 26 April 1328, D(W)1734/2/1/598, m.4r.

²⁶ Langdon (Staffs), court of 12 January 1328, Staffordshire Record Office D(W)1734/2/1/598, m.1r.

²⁷ Zvi Razi & Richard M. Smith: «The origins of the English manorial court rolls as a written record: a puzzle», in Z. Razi & R. M. Smith (ed.): Medieval Society and the Manor Court, pp. 45-49.

²⁸ See, for instance, the complaints against the actions of the steward of Christ Church Canterbury by the tenants of Bocking, John F. Nichols: «An early fourteenth century petition from the tenants of Bocking to their manorial lord», Economic History Review, II (1929-30), pp. 300-307.

²⁹ Paul A. Brand: «Stewards, bailiffs and the emerging legal profession in the later thirteenth century», in Ralph Evans (ed.): Lordship and learning. Studies in memory of Trevor Aston, Woodbridge , Boydell & Brewer, 2004, pp. 139-153.

³⁰ Ruyton (Shropshire), court of 3 June 1344, Shropshire Archives 6000 /7401, m.6r.

³¹ C. Briggs: Credit and village society, pp. 57-62.

³² Ibidem, pp. 60-61.

³³ Ibidem, p. 60; a sum of 20 s. was equivalent to almost four quarters of wheat, based on David Farmer’s average grain price for the period 1330/1-1346/7, or in other words, sufficient higher quality grain to feed four people for a year, David L. Farmer: «Prices and wages», in Herbert E. Hallam (ed.): The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. II, 1042-1350, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 787-791.

³⁴ Ph. R. Schofield: «Dealing in crisis».

³⁵ Ibidem, Figure 1 and associated discussion citing data in C. Briggs: Credit and village society, p. 59.

³⁶ Ph. R. Schofield: «Dealing in crisis», Figure 2 and associated discussion citing data in Ph. R. Schofield: «Social economy», p. 54.

³⁷ James Davis: Medieval market morality. Life, law and ethics in the English marketplace, 1200-1500, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 207-211 (quote at p. 208); Select cases concerning the law merchant, volume 1, ed. Charles Gross: Selden Society, 23, 1908, pp. xxiii-xxvii.

³⁸ Robert L. Henry: Contracts in the local courts of medieval England, London, Longmans, 1926, pp. 68-69.

³⁹ Court rolls of Walsham-le-Willows, 1303-1350, ed. Ray Lock, Suffolk Records Society, XLI, 1998, p. 92.

⁴⁰ Great Barton, court of 17 March 1316, Suffolk Record Office E18/151/1; the case is discussed in more detail in Ph. R. Schofield: «Dealing in crisis».

⁴¹ Horsham St Faith, court of 7 Oct. 1311, Norfolk Record Office, NRS 19498.

⁴² For similar points but in a different context, see Phillipp R. Schofield: «English law and Welsh Marcher courts in the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries», in Ralph A. Griffiths & Phillipp R. Schofield (ed.): Wales and the Welsh in the Middle Ages, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2011, pp. 108-125.