Medieval women and urban justice

Commerce, crime and community in England, 1300–1500

Teresa Phipps

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526134592
• eBook ISBN: 9781526134615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book provides a detailed analysis of women's involvement in litigation and other legal actions within their local communities in late-medieval England. It draws upon the rich records of three English towns – Nottingham, Chester and Winchester – and their courts to bring to life the experiences of hundreds of women within the systems of local justice. Through comparison of the records of three towns, and of women's roles in different types of legal action, the book reveals the complex ways in which individual women's legal status could vary according to their marital status, different types of plea and the town that they lived in. At this lowest level of medieval law, women's status was malleable, making each woman's experience of justice unique.

1

Women, town courts and customary law in context

When medieval women engaged in legal action, they did so through a system that was characterised by the existence of multiple overlapping and competing jurisdictions. The late middle ages was a period of increasing legal consciousness and litigiousness, which saw women frequently drawn into litigation or facing the punishment of local regulatory systems. The records created by these systems are central to our understanding of urban women’s interaction with the law, and their day-to-day experiences more broadly. It is through the records of town courts that we are able to identify women as traders and consumers, their role in crafts and business, aspects of their interpersonal relationships, claims over property and their illegal activities. But despite this, town courts are often only discussed in passing in histories of medieval law, categorised as ‘borough courts’ among lists of various non-royal courts, with little attention paid to how they operated in practice. Though they were certainly not the most powerful courts in England, they are significant for their broad jurisdiction and the fact that they may have offered the most frequent interaction with the law for many, if not a majority, of the residents of England’s towns. They dealt with disputes and issues that arose from everyday life and trade, rather than exceptional acts of crime or high-value financial disputes. It is this ‘ordinariness’ that makes these courts notable. Despite a wealth of records, urban court records remain relatively underused, and there is no existing overview of the practical nature of these courts and their records, nor the actions of women within urban justice in medieval England.¹ This chapter therefore serves as an essential introduction both to town courts and to the specific places that are the focus of this study. It surveys and describes the towns and courts that lie at the heart of this book, the nature of the legal process, and the records that this created, before setting out the way that these records have been approached in compiling this study, thereby establishing the context within which urban women accessed and engaged with the legal system.

Towns and courts

This study intentionally focuses on ‘middling’ status late medieval English towns. Nottingham, Chester and Winchester sat somewhere in the middle of the country’s urban hierarchy, smaller in population and of lesser political and economic stature than large cities such as London, Bristol, Norwich and York, but more developed and urbanised than the hundreds of small towns that bridged the gap between urban and rural society. The focus is therefore on the experiences of those women and men who lived at the more ‘ordinary’ level of the medieval urban experience, though of course there were variations in social status and wealth within each place. Each town had a local court (or courts) that met regularly and dealt with a range of litigation, complaints and offences arising from the interactions, rhythms and disturbances of urban life. The towns were governed by a group of officials selected from among the leading merchants of each town and often drawn from networks of families, the men of which held various offices over multiple generations. The right to elect these officials was usually granted via a town’s charter and was a key component of self-governance that made towns islands of limited independence from the crown, in return for the payment of an annual fee. Urban officials – mayors, bailiffs or sheriffs – presided over the courts of their towns, while lesser officials were responsible for administrative jobs such as collecting the payments made to the courts (affeerers). In the court rolls of each town, we find complaints about unpaid debts, withheld goods, acts of violence and misbehaviour, presentments for common nuisances and disturbances and broken trading regulations. These seemingly mundane issues illuminate the lives and relationships of thousands of individuals of all statuses, both men and women. Despite this, the court rolls have received limited attention from historians, bar a handful of antiquarian works and short studies focusing on individual aspects of the legal experience.²

Each of the three towns held a unique status within medieval England, and they were also geographically spread across the south, north-west and midland areas of the country, as Map 1 illustrates. All three towns discussed here were provincial centres with markets, fairs and trade links with their hinterlands. Nottingham and Chester had populations of around 3,000–4,000 before the Black Death, while Winchester was larger at around 6,000.³ Winchester ranked as the 14^th wealthiest town according to the Lay Subsidy of 1334, and was also 14^th by population under the 1377 Poll Tax.⁴ It was the ancient capital of England, held directly for the king. However, the close connection between Winchester and the king’s court lapsed during the latter part of Henry I’s reign, and it was no longer a royal capital by the reign of Stephen.⁵ As part of this decline from royal capital to provincial cathedral city, Winchester gradually came to be overtaken in wealth by other towns in the region such as Southampton, though proximity to London and the south coast meant that it maintained important political and trading connections.⁶ These international links are also indicated through the appearance of numerous French and Flemish individuals in the city’s court rolls.

Chester was also a site of administrative importance throughout the later medieval period. It was the centre of the county Palatine held by the earls of Chester, meaning that the county and city was excluded from parliamentary taxes after 1290, making comparison of population and wealth difficult. However, it has been suggested that Chester was perhaps 33^rd largest in population size around the time of the 1377 Poll Tax.⁷ As the centre of the Palatinate, Chester has been termed a ‘mini-Westminster’, with its own exchequer, law courts and a large number of officials.⁸ It was also an important military base due to its proximity to North Wales and links to Ireland. The geographical setting of the city and its links beyond England are evident in the identities of some of those who appeared in the court rolls, where we regularly find names indicating Irish or Welsh roots. Chester was also somewhat unique in its region as the only centre to develop many of the characteristics of the large towns found throughout the north-east, midlands and south of England. Though the county was somewhat politically separate from the rest of England, the city itself had considerable independence in local government. In 1300, the citizens of Chester obtained the fee farm of the city from the earl of Chester for £100, in much the same way as other towns were farmed from the crown.⁹ The governance of the city therefore echoed the administration of other medieval towns, despite the existence of the Palatinate.

Nottingham was perhaps a more ‘ordinary’ provincial centre. It was the 25^th wealthiest town in England in 1334, and ranked 29^th in terms of population under the 1377 Poll Tax.¹⁰ After the Norman Conquest it consisted of two ancient boroughs, French (Norman) and English (Anglo-Saxon), though by the fourteenth century this division had very little impact on everyday town life and governance.¹¹ It was a central trading place within the midlands and was well connected to other important towns and Danelaw boroughs of Derby, Leicester, Newark and Lincoln. The royal castle was used as a residence by the king on visits to the area, and it was the site of a number of Parliaments. During the Wars of the Roses, the castle was an important military stronghold, though the town lacked the unique status of Winchester and Chester. All three towns therefore shared common features in the nature of their urban status (and, as we will see, in the structures of local justice), while possessing unique features arising from their distinct geographical and political contexts. They were large, important towns within their local areas, though less important on the national scale, and were thus characterised by ranging social structures and a diverse collection of occupations. Individuals interacted regularly at markets, fairs, shops and through the institutions of urban government – including courts.

Town courts lay at the heart of urban life, both physically and symbolically. They met in guildhalls or other civic buildings that were located at the centre of their towns, close to markets and shops, representing the close ties between urban government, law and trade. The rights of towns and their burgesses concerning justice were often enshrined in borough charters, setting out the privileges of towns and the right to collect the profits of justice. All courts were presided over by the town’s leading officials, such as mayors, bailiffs or sheriffs, and met regularly, sometimes multiple times per week. They were therefore the most frequent, accessible site of legal recourse for most townspeople. These courts came into their own during the late medieval period. Most of the earliest surviving records stem from around the late thirteenth century, with the earliest English borough court rolls, such as those of Ipswich, surviving from the 1250s.¹²

Town courts provided a local, accessible and efficient forum for dispute resolution in accordance with medieval ideals of justice, governing acceptable behaviour and offering reconciliation to conflicting parties.¹³ They were forums for both litigation between residents as well as presentments concerning local policing and regulation. Both forms of law involved numerous women of all statuses and life cycle stages, allowing an essential insight into the nature of women’s experiences of the law within the urban community. Litigation was dealt with by courts often classified as borough courts (though not all towns were boroughs). They heard complaints which can be broadly categorised as either commercial (debt, detinue, covenant) or interpersonal (trespass, or trespass and bloodshed), which together spanned a wide range of interactions and transactions. These courts met frequently, usually on fixed days of the week (Wednesdays fortnightly in Nottingham) or on multiple days each week (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays in Winchester). The towns’ charters and customs do not explicitly state whether each court was for the sole use of burgesses, though various statements regarding the rights of foreigners (those from outside the town) or aliens (from other countries) suggest that these were primarily courts for residents, if not specifically burgesses. Pleas arose from actions or behaviours that departed from expected codes of behaviour and obligations, and they allowed litigants to publicly express their discontent and perceived harm in the process of renegotiating damaged social and commercial ties. Those who were the subject of these complaints could acknowledge the allegations against them, or contest them and face the judgement of a jury. The majority were pleas of debt and trespass, and other suits related to land and covenants. Courts also enrolled the transfer of urban landholding rights into their official records.

Local officials also had rights over the policing and regulation of trade, behaviour and the urban environment. These can be defined as rights of leet jurisdiction under which policing and enforcement rights of the crown were devolved to local officials or lords via courts that met a few times each year. This policing usually took the form of presentments made by local jurors or tithingmen (in Nottingham they were called decennaries), whereby offences were listed noting the names of the individuals responsible and the fines issued. These were offences against the town itself – and by extension the crown – and there was usually no means for offenders to respond to or deny allegations. In exercising this jurisdiction, local officials were able to punish wrongful actions as agents of the crown.¹⁴ The records of these presentments, concerning affrays, illegal and immoral activity, nuisances and trading offences, are generally more patchy than the correlating records of litigation, in part due to the fact that these offences were presented only periodically each year.

The evolution of borough courts was part of the broader development of the English legal system, manifesting what Anthony Musson has described as a growth in legal consciousness both among the nascent legal professions and in ‘the reserves of knowledge and thought of those who experienced the law and legal institutions in everyday life’.¹⁵ Court attendance enhanced knowledge of legal practice, and those awaiting dispute resolution might also have learned from conversations with others, observing other suits or calling on the advice of more experi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• Introduction
• 1 Women, town courts and customary law in context
• 2 Commerce, credit and coverture: women and debt litigation
• 3 Law and the regulation of women’s work
• 4 Violence, property and ‘bad speech’: women and trespass litigation
• 5 Public disorder, policing and misbehaving women
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index