Law Flashcards
Kingship
- Historian Harding focuses on justice + the law
- Richard sought legal advice as to whether the Commission had infringed on his royal powers, including ‘can the King dissolve parliament at his pleasure?’ (McHardy, 2012)
- Henry decided not to take the throne by conquest – would create political instability + allow him to repeal laws and create new ones (not seen to be maintaining the law)
- Charge 8 = trying to “oppress his people” by ordering Rolls of Parliament to be erased
- Expansion + hatred of JPs
Public awareness
- In Middle Ages, juries expected to be fact-finders – men drawn from local communities – investigate a case and present the facts to the court – puts community in powerful position in presentation and judgment of cases
- Jurors able to act between mediators of law and the complex of human life + situations
- Lack of clear distinctions between murder and manslaughter in 15th C – jurors created distinction in the way they presented the cases
- Royal + community power dependent on each other
- Ipswich 1344 = mock judicial sessions – community response to unpopular royal commissions that were looking into illegal trade in the port – trying to parody what the royal officials are doing
- Communities key in applying and contesting the law
Revolt
- Popular grievances often focused on access to justice
- Complaints focused on royal agents who abused power + infringed on local privilege
- Rebels claimed to be loyal subjects intervening to save the King from bad council
- About restoring order, not breaking it –> about rebellion not revolution
- 1450 = discontent with inefficiency of royal justice – major factor in revolt (Jack Cade’s rebellion) - bills articulate demand for justice – courts + tribunals being held in different parts of the county where people would have to travel long distances – problem with access to justice
- Rebels often set up alternative courts and try people themselves
- Cade + others took over a tribunal meant to try them and instead tried Henry VI’s advisors, ended up murdering Bishop of Salsbury (embedded in conception of justice)
- 1549 = Kett’s rebellion – led protestant army and formed a camp where he set himself up as a dispenser of justice. Takes on role of surrogate King – starts collecting taxes, about reclaiming forms of justice
- Tyler = “no law other than the law of Winchester” - Statute of Winchester = would give the peasants the right to bear arms and deal with the punishment of criminals
- Tyler = “execute all lawyers, escheators and others who had been trained in the law” (Omrod 1990)
Gender (women)
- Women were less likely to be convicted for serious crimes compared to men
– Male jurors might not have wanted to put women on trial
– Couverture = shifted responsibility to their husbands – no separate identity - 20% of convicted criminals were women
- Poor women were charged with petty crimes like assault, theft, verbal defamation
- Rape had low convictions – lack of proof, out of court settlements
- Domestic abuse was only reported to the courts when it was severe
- Legal documents only show the extremes – doesn’t show what most women experienced every day
Women’s voices often lost in the law + legal documents
– Only times when a women’s voice was at the centre:
(1) An appeal involving the murder of her husband
(2) An appeal involving her own rapist
– She told the story of events + named her culprit
– However, she may have told the story to men in the neighbourhood, the voice may be her father who’s saying effect on his daughter, there was a formula for processes to an appeal, the justices may have added their own words before concluding –> distortion of female voice
Rape shows ideas of sexual status
– Henry de Bracton = life imprisonment if he took a woman’s virginity, if married woman / widow it should be corporeal punishment (Hanawalt, 1998)
– Bratton = pregnancy only happened with consent
- Jurors believed castration / hanging was too severe a punishment for rape
– Emma, daughter of Christine, had been raped, but stated Emma wasn’t a virgin so the rapist shouldn’t be mutilated
- The jurors were very literal in their definition of virginity
– a 7-year-old who had been raped, they said because of her age the rapist could penetrate her but not take her maidenhead
- After Westminster II, only 10% of rape indictments resulted in conviction – usually involving young virgins
- Sometimes parties used monetary payments instead of the court system
– A man who sexually assaulted a child had to pay £40 which would be hers when she became an adult / married –> rape compensation was used as a dowry to make her more attractive for marriage (Hanawalt, 1998)
Poaching:
- The actual hunt itself = outsmarting foresters, camaraderie with joint exhibitions, could be economic motives (profits from selling meat)
Social interaction
- Poaching was a social activity, strengthening bonds between local clergy, knights and royal officials
- Poaching was a male bonding experience & form of entertainment
- For the nobility poaching was a way of strengthening local alliances + loyalties
– Simon Tuluse = cut off the head of a buck (male deer) and put a spindle in its mouth – sexual inversion (buck’s (male) mouth represented the vagina, and the spindle (female symbol) represented the penis) = poaching was a way of expressing masculinity and repressing women (Hanawalt, 1998)
- Spindle represented working-class women = statement about class as well as gender
– Hanawalt = Poaching thus set up a struggle for male domination of the forest
- Poaching was an act of rebellion, as they would do it even with the possibility of fines, imprisonment etc.
- Masculinity = danger, stealth, violence
Welsh women
- Welsh women couldn’t be witnesses against men in legal proceedings
- The law tracts say that the man is the ‘woman’s “lord” (dominus eius est)’ (Lansing, 2006)
- But husbands couldn’t act badly towards their wives without penalty
- Divorce possible, women could leave husbands for things like leprosy, impotence or bad breath
- Both free to remarry after divorce
- ‘Property arrangements were designed in such a way as to ensure the wife’s ability to support herself should the marriage fail’ (pg827)
- If they split during 1st 7 years of marriage and wasn’t due to a ‘fault of the wife’, she was entitled to a portion of the property, and if it was after 7 years they had to split all moveable property
- But 1517 – record of wife being “sold” ‘to another man by her husband’ (Lansing, 2006)
- Only 3 nunneries in Wales before the Dissolution, only around 35 (estimated) nuns in the country
- Gwerful Mechain – female poet (1460–1502) - but only female Welsh poet where many of her works have survived
