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In England during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, the royal courts cast a longer and longer shadow over private and local jurisdictions. By a series of steps embracing much innovation, the custom of the king's court gradually became the common law of England, and the royal courts asserted their supremacy over other jurisdictions in many areas. Foremost among these were disputes over freehold land and cases involving felonies. It has been suggested that the royal innovations’ jurisdictional effects on private courts were “neither intended nor foreseen.” Nonetheless, they reduced private jurisdictions—with the exception of the palatinates—to constitutional insignificance during the thirteenth century. Occasional baronial objections, such as that enshrined in clause thirty-four of Magna Carta or the bluff waving of a rusty sword at a quo warranto inquest do not disguise this basic fact of English legal and constitutional history.

THANKS to the writings of Maitland, Homans, Raftis, and others, it is well known that the doctrines of the medieval English common law concerning serfs are not an accurate guide to conditions of peasant life in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. Indeed, no one seriously takes them as such anymore. Manor courts administering customary law afforded peasants a large measure of legal protection in matters of landholding and inheritance. Many peasants, unfree as well as free, enjoyed in practice rights to contract and to alienate their landholdings by the end of the thirteenth century. Manorial offices such as reeveships and jurorships were not simply burdens to be avoided; they could also be positions of influence, sources of patronage, from which a peasant could exercise authority and pursue his own or his family's -as well as the lord's --agenda.This book reports the results of Dr. Britton's doctoral research on the abbot of Ramsey's village of Broughton, Hunts. Both its strengths and weaknesses are related to the author's historiographical assumptions. Britton is a social historian whose most successful efforts are directed towards analyzing systematically Broughton's social structures, that is, groups of villagers and their relationships with one another. His exposition of the virtues of his social historical methodology is similar to that found in the works of Professors J. A. Raftis and E. B. DeWindt. Britton regularly criticizes legal, constitutional, and economic historians for concentrating on the nature of the relationship between lord and man, which he sees as a question of distinctly minor importance. Like DeWindt in his study of Holywell-cum-Needingworth, Britton distinguishes families on the basis of the number of times their members discharged important administrative offices -reeve, juror, ale-taster, and others. He then shows inter alia that the families most frequently holding office, the main, or "A" families, 54% of village population, controlled over 83% of customary landholdings and 92% of freehold tenures (pp. 13, 82, 84). They also bore the brunt of taxation in the lay subsidies of 1327 and 1332, and thus possessed most of the surplus livestock and produce (p. 74).The families least frequently holding office, "C" families, 34% of village population, held only 6% of the customary acreage and 8% of the freehold (pp. 13, 82, 84). They supplied 59% of village tradesmen, however, compared with 22% from the "A" group (p. 91).Britton tries to correlate the social and economic differences among village families with incidents of violence and "social friction" found in the court rolls. Of 209 incidents from 1288 to 1340, 114 (45%) were between members of "A" and "C" families, whom Britton describes as "haves" and "have nots" (p. 122). A further 64 (31%) were confined to the "A" group, while a further 23 (11%) were confined to the "C" group (p. 122). Thus "A" families were involved in 76% of all incidents of "friction" in the village, while "C" families were involved in 56%. Related to...

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