John Hudson

The formation of the English common law : law and society in England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta

Introduction the court framework in Anglo-Normal England violence and theft in Anglo-Norman England law and land-holding in Anglo-Normal England Angevin reform crime and the Angevin reforms law and land-holding in Angevin England Magna Carta and the formation of English common law.

Land, law, and lordship in Anglo-Norman England

This is an important new interpretation of the development of land law in England during the century after the Norman Conquest. Norman society was based on land and lordship, and the relative power of lord and vassal was crucial to the control of the land. John Hudson exploits a wealth of surviving charter and chronicle evidence in this scholarly analysis. His approach integrates social, political, administrative and intellectual history. Dr Hudson examines the uses to which lords and vassals put their lands, the relationship between them, and the constraints upon them. He traces the increasing sophistication of law and the changes in royal reassessment of legal developments in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

COURT CASES AND LEGAL ARGUMENTS IN ENGLAND, c .1066–1166

THE relationship between law, the power of participants in disputes, and the structure of society and politics is always a complex one. It is also, not surprisingly therefore, controversial in writings on jurisprudence, modern law, and legal history. In this paper I argue for the importance of legal norms in the conduct of disputes in England in the period between the Norman Conquest and the early Angevin legal reforms. This importance is certainly related to the extent of Anglo-Norman royal power. However, in a wider context I shall argue against any necessary, simple, and direct link between political structure and the existence and influence of legal norms.

Emotions in the Early Common Law (c. 1166–1215)

ABSTRACT Beyond dealing with wrongdoing and litigation, law has many other functions. It can be designed to make life more predictable, it can facilitate and promote certain actions, it can seek to prevent disputes by laying down rules, and provide routes to solutions other than litigation should disputes arise. All of these can have connections to matters of emotion. Using both lawbooks and records of cases from the Angevin period, the present article begins by looking at issues of land law rather than crime, and at law outside rather than inside court. It then returns to crime and litigation before exploring the significance of the nature of legal records for the relationship between emotion and law. In doing so, it pays attention to emotion in action, to uses of emotionally charged language, to appearances of the vocabulary of emotions, and to the routinized use of words that might at other times or in other contexts have an emotional element. Underlying the analysis is an exploration of the ways in which some aspects of law became more discrete from ordinary social practice and discourse, in this instance through elements of distancing from emotion.

The Making of Europe: A Brief Summary

The Making of Europe is an exceptionally bold, three-hundred-page essay on the processes of European expansion and on how this expansion “made Europe.” Its subject matter and core themes are pithily provided by the subtitle: “Conquest, colonization and cultural change 950–1350.” Such groupings of subjects, and their frequent but not inevitable interconnection, are the book’s defining characteristic.1

Law and Codification: Conclusion

Issues of codification have been very important for legal historiography, including for discussions of legal institutionalisation. Furthermore, whilst codification is not a necessary aspect of legal institutionalisation, examination of codification provides an entry point for wider consideration of institutionalisation, for example on the subjects of written and oral, specialised knowledge and its uses, abstraction and continuity. This chapter shows how the assumption of certain criteria or archetypes, in this case the Justinianic form of codification, can limit analysis; indeed, it may start to seem that the Justinianic case is the anomaly, at least in the pre-modern period. It shows how divergences need not only be between Islam, Byzantium, and Western Christendom. Such complexity would be reinforced if added to the analysis were bodies of customary law, most clearly - because of the sources and because of later history - that which grew into the English Common Law. Keywords: Byzantium; Codification; English Common Law; Islam; Justianic form; legal historiography; specialised knowledge; Western Christendom

Legal History and the History of Disputes

Crucial issues in the study of disputes are treated in new and interesting ways. This chapter concentrates on the possibilities for comparative approaches to the study of dispute. Such comparison can now be pursued further through careful selection of comparable primary sources. An alternative form of comparison is between levels of society. A third axis of comparison is chronological. First, the best medieval accounts of cases tend to be extensive because the case was for some reason a difficult one: disputes where the issue was simple, and possibly most clearly determined by norms, would not be recorded, or certainly not recorded at such length. Second, different types of norm might be of different determinacy in particular situations. Third, even if legal norms do not determine the outcome of cases, they may determine what the parties do not argue, because any such argument would be trumped by appeal to the norm. Keywords: argument; disputes; legal norms; levels of society; medieval accounts of cases

Constitutions of Clarendon, Clause 3, and Henry II’s Reforms of Law and Administration

This chapter assesses the relationship between clause 3 of the 1164 Constitutions of Clarendon, often referred to as the provision concerning criminal clerks, and the practices and reform of the administration of justice in the 1160s. The chapter argues that a key purpose of the provision was to bring at least important cases of clerical crime not just to lay courts but specifically to the kings court, and suggests that the measure placed particular reliance on the kings chief justiciars. It distinguishes the limited amount of strictly contemporary evidence from the larger amount produced after 1170, particularly the Lives of the now martyred archbishop. The chapter considers the notorious cases of clerical crime that so angered Henry II, and examines the 1164 Constitutions of Clarendon. Keywords:Canon Law; clause 3; clerical crime; Constitutions of Clarendon; Henry II; judicial administration

Magna Carta: The quality of the Great Charter

Historians have debated long and hard about the quality of Magna Carta. The debate has not been about that alone, but also about the origins of the Charter and the character of the men who produced it. This necessary attempt to carry the argument outwards into broader fields has contributed to some confusion in which assessments of the Charter and assessments of the men who were involved have been used to determine the problem of origin and responsibility. On this Stubbss attitude was certain, clear and consistent. For him Magna Carta was the greatest single formative document in English history, and he was under no doubt that the barons of the Opposition were in the main responsible for it: ‘Who were the barons that now impose limits on royal tyranny, and place themselves in the vanguard of liberty? How have they come to sit in the seats and wield the swords of those whom so lately we saw arrayed in feudal might against king and people?’ As to their character Stubbs was in no doubt: ‘The barons maintain and secure the right of the whole people as against themselves as well as against their master’; their demands ‘were no selfish exaction of privilege for themselves’; they had ‘cut themselves loose from Normandy and Norman principles and reconciled themselves to the nobler position of leaders of their brother Englishmen’.