Paul Brand

‘Deserving’ and ‘Undeserving’ Wives: Earning and Forfeiting Dower in Medieval England

Abstract Under the rules of the medieval common law, widows were normally entitled automatically to a third share of their late husbands lands as their dower. A series of case beginning in the middle of the thirteenth century indicates, however, that widows were only entitled to their dower if they had been old enough to ‘earn’ their dower by the time their husbands died and that this meant being old enough to engage in full sexual intercourse. Under the provisions of chapter 34 of the statute of Westminster II (1285) it also became possible for wives to forfeit their claim to dower for adultery. The following two decades provide evidence of around 100 cases in which these provisions were invoked. These two developments suggest that during the second half of the thirteenth century there was a significant shift away from seeing dower as an automatic entitlement arising out of any valid marriage to seeing it instead as a ‘reward’ for service rendered by the wife during marriage.

The Date and Authorship of Bracton: a Response

This paper is a response to John Bartons posthumous paper on the date and authorship of the English thirteenth-century legal treatise Bracton. That paper was an extended critique of sections of a much shorter paper I had published in 1996 on these and related topics. It responds to the main criticisms Barton makes of my paper. It accepts a few of these but not others, and does not accept his main arguments against assigning a date prior to 1240 for significant parts of the treatise nor his renewed assertion of the claims of Henry de Bracton to be the sole author of the treatise.

The Origins of ‘Alien Status’ in the English Common Law

ABSTRACT In his 2001 monograph on Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship, Dr Keechang Kim suggested that there was no evidence before the late fourteenth century that birth beyond the sea made a person an alien. This article discusses a series of cases heard from the mid-thirteenth century onwards in which tenants pleaded the claimants birth overseas by way of bar to hereditary claims to land and in which it seems to have been treated as a bar in itself, though one to which the king might grant special exemption. This seems to have remained the position until legislation of 1351 (triggered by doubts about the eligibility of two sons of Edward III born overseas to succeed to the throne) which not only confirmed their eligibility but also made the first general extension of the right to inherit to children born overseas to parents in the kings allegiance.

Judges and Juries in Civil Litigation in Later Medieval England: The Millon Thesis Reconsidered

ABSTRACT David Millon argued in a 1989 article that medieval and early modern legal historians had been beguiled into supposing that civil litigation in these periods was decided in accordance with the ‘official’ legal doctrine found in law reports, plea roll arguments and Inns of Court readings when in reality their outcome was generally determined by juries exercising their own normative discretion in reaching their verdicts. This paper challenges this pessimistic conclusion, at least for the period around 1300. It demonstrates from evidence drawn from plea rolls and mainly manuscript law reports the degree of judicial control over juries exercised within the courtroom and the way in which jury verdicts were considered, and not just accepted, by courts. It also argues that the application of substantive legal rules by judges for the decision of litigation was a more important phenomenon than Millon supposed and that legal rules were also regularly invoked and applied in the preliminary pleading in cases and thereby shaped and determined the issues which went for jury decision.

A Versatile Legal Administrator and More: The Career of John of Fressingfield in England, Ireland and Beyond

John of Fressingfield had a long and a varied career.1 That career began in England some time before 1290; took him to Ireland in 1295, where he lived for 12 years; brought him back to live in England in 1307, but then took him off on official journeys to the Channel Islands in the summer of 1309 as well as to Avignon and to Gascony in 1309 and 1310. It seems to have ended shortly after his capture in south Wales as one of the supporters of Hugh Despenser the younger and subsequent ransom in 1321. It encompassed clerical service as a clerk of the Common Bench at Westminster between 1289 and 1291, as a senior clerk of the ‘northern’ eyre circuit led by Hugh of Cressingham between 1292 and 1294, as keeper of the rolls and writs of the Dublin Bench between 1296 and 1298 and as chief clerk of the justiciar, John Wogan, in 1299. Closely connected with this was his judicial career: initially in Ireland as a temporary replacement justice in the justiciar’s court in 1302–1303 and 1305–1306 as well as in the Tipperary eyre of 1305–1307; then as chief justice of the Channel Islands eyre held in the summer of 1309; finally as a judicial commissioner appointed to various special and general commissions in England between 1311 and 1317. He also had a brief military career: in charge of the castles of Roscommon, Rindown and Athlone in 1299–1300, leader of an Irish contingent to Scotland in the service of Edward I in 1301–1302, and presumably with Hugh Despenser the younger at the end of his life.