Wool Smuggling and the Royal Government in England, c.1337–63: Law Enforcement and the Moral Economy in the Late Middle Ages
Keywords:
Wool smuggling Medieval England Royal taxation Law enforcement Wool trade regulationAbstract
AbstractThe process of law enforcement helped to shape the state in the Middle Ages. This article uses an extensive array of court records to provide the first detailed account of royal efforts to police the illegal export of wool in mid-fourteenth century England, when the wool trade was subjected to unprecedented levels of taxation and discussed in moral, as well as fiscal, terms. It shows that these efforts remained heavily centralized in terms of both personnel and institutional form when many other areas of royal law enforcement were becoming increasingly devolved. The article then situates this centralized enforcement form within contemporary criticisms of royal taxation, the place of the royal courts in the wider legal geography of commercial regulation, and the localized dynamic underpinning many legal processes. It argues that the enforcement process was shaped and, indeed, blunted by a critical debate over the extent of royal power and its place within England’s “moral economy.” By situating the regulation of the wool trade in this series of regulatory and economic contexts at a particularly important moment in the development of the late medieval tax state, this article reveals wool smuggling to be a subject of wider significance to historians interested in the nature and—particularly—the limits of royal power and royal law in medieval England.
References
1
The spread of the extant sources, along with the need to impose parameters on my research, means that this article adopts an Anglocentric perspective. I do not wish to imply by doing so that the wider themes engaged here might not be relevant to the study of royal authority in other parts of the Plantagenet dominions, or that we do not need to integrate the histories of these dominions into our understanding of Plantagenet kingship.
2
See, for instance, G. Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25–31, 232–36, 281–86.
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4
As per J. Masschaele, Jury, State, and Society in Medieval England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 5: “One of the striking things about medieval English courts is the extent to which local people, other than those who were litigating or disputing, had to be involved in the process for it to work.”
5
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6
Notably E.M. Carus-Wilson and O. Coleman, England's Export Trade 1275–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 18–19, 21–32. See also Baker, R.L., “The English Customs Service, 1307–1343: A Study of Medieval Administration,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, new ser., 51 (1961): 35–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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Ibid., 10, 29, 188–9.
16
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See Ormrod, W.M., “‛Common Profit’ and ‛The Profit of the King and Kingdom’: Parliament and the Development of Political Language in England, 1250–1450,” Viator 46 (2015): 219–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. An important study based on the relevance of this sense of paternalism is B. Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: The Regulation of Grain Marketing 1256–1631 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
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A central argument of G.L. Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
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See n. 197.
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See, for example, E. Miller, “War, Taxation and the English Economy in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” in War and Economic Development, ed. J.M. Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 11–31; and J.R. Maddicott, “The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294–1341,” repr. in Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England, ed. T.H. Aston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for Past & Present Publications, 1987), 285–359.
22
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D. Acemoglu, S. Johnson, and J.A. Robinson, “Institutions as a Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth,” in Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 1A, ed. P. Aghion and S. Durlauf (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), esp. 390–93, 394–96, 427–28, 439; and S. Ogilvie and A.W. Carus, “Institutions and Growth in Historical Perspective,” in Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 2A, ed. P. Aghion and S. Durlauf (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014), esp. 406–7, 417, 428, 429–36, 470.
24
See T.H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 29–31, 36–37.
25
Ibid., 60–64.
26
Ibid., 76–80.
27
The rates of customs and subsidies are tabulated in Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England's Export Trade, 196.
28
Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 423–24.
29
For this and the following sentences, see M. Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 252–55; Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 76–82, 95–97; and Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 422–25.
30
M. Prestwich, ed., Documents illustrating the Crisis of 1297–98, Camden Society Fourth Series Volume 24 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), 117.
31
For the cessation of the subsidy, see Calendar of Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1296–1302 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1906), 187, 198.
32
See also Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 426.
33
Calendar of Fine Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1327–37 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1913), 342; and Calendar of Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1333–37 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1898), 60.
34
Customs revenues are tabulated in W.M. Ormrod, “England in the Middle Ages,” in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815, ed. R. Bonney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33 (fig. 1.11).
35
A point made in Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 428.
36
Ormrod, “England in the Middle Ages,” 42 (fig. 1.16). And note W.M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1327–1377 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1990), 182: “[Edward III's taxation of wool exports] made the customs and subsidies the single most important weapon in the financial armoury of the late medieval state.”
37
A.R. Bell, C. Brooks, and P. Dryburgh, The English Wool Market, c. 1230–1327 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The contracts underpinning this study are edited in A.R. Bell, C. Brooks, and P. Dryburgh, eds., Advance Contracts for the Sale of Wool c. 1200–c. 1327, List & Index Society Volume 315 (Kew: The National Archives, 2006).
38
Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 123–43; and T.H. Lloyd, Alien Merchants in England in the High Middle Ages (New York: St Martin's Press, 1982). Note the logic behind the terminal date for their study set out in Bell, Brooks, and Dryburgh, The English Wool Market, 12–13, 151.
39
Wool prices are tabulated in T.H. Lloyd, The Movement of Wool Prices in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 40–41. These data are reproduced as a figure in M. Raven, “Wool Smuggling from England's Eastern Seaboard, c.1337–43: An Illicit Economy in the Late Middle Ages,” Economic History Review, new ser., 75 (2022), Early View (https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13141): 15 (fig. 3).
40
The interests of peasant producers were stressed in E. Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 20–40. More recently, see J. Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150–1350 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), ch. 2, esp. 53–54; and P. Slavin, “Peasant Livestock Husbandry in Late-Thirteenth-Century Suffolk: Economy, Environment and Society,” in Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy, 9–11, 22.
41
For contemporary recognition of the link between prices and the subsidies, see Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 434–35.
42
Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 427–30, 444–47. Although his interpretation now seems dated, there is still much of value in G. Unwin, “The Estate of Merchants,” in Finance and Trade under Edward III, ed. G. Unwin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918), 179–255.
43
Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 429.
44
Ibid., 430–31.
45
C. Given-Wilson, P. Brand, J.R.S. Phillips, W.M. Ormrod, G. Martin, A. Curry, and R. Horrox, eds., The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 16 vols. (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005) (hereafter PROME), V: 136–37, 148. See also Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 188–90.
46
For the scheme's novelty, see E.B. Fryde, Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983), II:1180.
47
T. Rymer, ed., Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae et cuiuscunque Generis Acta Publica, 4 vols. in 7 parts (London: Record Commission, 1819–69), II.ii:943–94.
48
Fryde, Studies, VI, forms the basis for this paragraph. See also W.M. Ormrod, Edward III (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2011), 194, 197–98. For Edward III's finances at this stage of the war more generally, see the following by Fryde, E.B., “Materials for the Study of Edward III's Credit Operations, 1327–48,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 22 (1949): 105–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fryde, E.B., “Materials for the Study of Edward III's Credit Operations, 1327–48,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 23 (1950): 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fryde, Studies, VII.
49
This is discussed in Munro, J.H., “Wool-Price Schedules and the Qualities of English Wools in the Later Middle Ages c.1270–1499,” Textile History 9 (1978): 135–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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Fryde, Studies, VI:12–13.
51
Ibid., 21–22.
52
For thinking on mercantile avarice, see Sacks, D.H., “The Greed of Judas: Avarice, Monopoly, and the Moral Economy in England, ca. 1350-ca. 1600,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 263–307Google Scholar; and R.A. Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 63–66.
53
Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 144–92. For bans imposed under Edward I, see Calendar of Close Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1288–96 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), 261, 264; and Calendar of Close Rolls 1296–1302, 266.
54
D.L. Farmer, “Marketing the Produce of the Countryside, 1200–1500,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III: 1350–1500, ed. E. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 350–55; and J. Masschaele, “Transport Costs in Medieval England,” Economic History Review, new ser., 46 (1993): 270–73.
55
E 372/183, rot. 48d; and J.F. Willard, “Inland Transportation in England during the Fourteenth Century,” Speculum 1 (1926): 367–68. For a later example, see A. Hanham, The Celys and their World: An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 119.
56
Langdon, J., “Inland Water Transport in Medieval England,” Journal of Historical Geography 19 (1993): 1–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jones, E.T., “River Navigation in Medieval England,” Journal of Historical Geography 26 (2000): 60–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57
There is information on the geographical spread of sheep farming in H.E. Hallam, P.F. Brandon, J.A. Raftis, C. Dyer, J. Hatcher, E. Miller, and R.I. Jack , “Farming Techniques,” in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, II: 1042–1350, ed. H.E. Hallam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 272–496; J.A. Tuck, E. Miller, R. Britnell, E. King, C. Dyer, D.H. Owen, P.D.A. Harvey, M. Mate, and H.S.A. Fox, “Farming Practices and Techniques,” in Agrarian History of England and Wales, III: 1350–1500, 175–323; and B.M.S. Campbell, English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156–57, 161–63.
58
W. Childs, “Government and Market in the Early Fourteenth Century,” in Ruling Fourteenth-Century England: Essays in Honour of Christopher Given-Wilson, ed. R. Ambühl, J. Bothwell, and L. Tompkins (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019), 48–50.
59
Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 171–72.
60
PROME, IV:347–49.
61
A. Luders, T.E. Tomlins, W.E. Taunton, and J. Raithby, eds., Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London: Record Commission, 1810–28), I:332–43.
62
For a complaint by the commonalties of Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, and parts of Suffolk, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, and Leicestershire on travel distance to the nearest staple port and a request for a new staple to be established at Lynn because of this, see Special Collections 8/16/751; PROME, V:282.
63
D. Crook, “The Later Eyres,” English Historical Review 97 (1982): 241–68; and C. Burt, “The Demise of the General Eyre in the Reign of Edward I,” English Historical Review 120 (2005): 1–14.
64
The classic work is that of Bertha Haven Putnam: see “The Transformation of the Keepers of the Peace into the Justices of the Peace 1327–1380,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 12 (1929): 19–48; and B.H. Putnam, ed., Proceedings before the Justices of the Peace in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Ames Foundation, 1938). For a synthesis of post-Putnam work and its implications, see C. Carpenter, “War, Government and Governance in England in the Later Middle Ages,” in Conflict, Consequences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), 16‒21.
65
See M. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30–8.
66
H. Cam, “Studies in the Hundred Rolls: Some Aspects of Thirteenth-Century Administration,” in Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History VI, ed. P. Vinogradoff (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 34–5 (noting the temporary and specific character of this article). For an example of an inquiry at this time, see Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 1307–77, 2 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916–37), I, no. 964.
67
R.W. Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown: The Riccardi of Lucca and Edward I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 142–46.
68
Perhaps in part because the customs revenues were often assigned to Italian banking houses in return for credit advanced to the king, rather than accruing to him directly: Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown, 105, 135–71; M. Prestwich, “Italian Merchants in Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth-Century England,” in The Dawn of Modern Banking, ed. F. Chiapelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 77–104; A.R. Bell, C. Brooks, and T.K. Moore, “Credit Finance in Thirteenth-Century England: The Ricciardi of Lucca and Edward I, 1272–1294,” in Thirteenth Century England XIII, ed. J. Burton, F. Lachaud, P. Schofield, K. Stöber, and Björn Weiler (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), 101–16. This practice continued until the collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi in the early years of Edward III's reign: Fryde, Studies, IV:207–8.
69
S. Raban, A Second Domesday? The Hundred Rolls of 1279–80 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 192–203 (appendix 3); and Cam, “Studies in the Hundred Rolls,” 91–101. The chancery rolls of the 1290s do not contain the numerous orders for inquiry seen under Edward III. The records of crown pleas heard in the London eyre of 1276 do not show a drive to prosecute evasion: Martin Weinbaum, ed., The London Eyre of 1276, London Record Society Volume 12 (London: London Record Society, 1976), nor do the records of the 1293 Northumberland eyre: C.M. Fraser, ed., The Northumberland Eyre Roll for 1293, Surtees Society Volume 211 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for the Surtees Society, 2007), nor, seemingly, did the large-scale trailbaston inquiries of 1304–5 and 1306–7, the Kent eyre of 1312–13, or the Kent keepers of the peace in 1316–17 target customs evasion: Cam, “Studies in the Hundred Rolls,” 75 n. 3, 76–7; A. Musson and E. Powell, eds. and trans., Crime, Law and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 114–17; F.W. Maitland, L.W.V. Harcourt, and W.C. Bolland, eds., The Eyre of Kent, 6 & 7 Edward II, Selden Society Volume 24 (London: Selden Society, 1910), 28–45; and B.H. Putnam, ed., Kent Keepers of the Peace, 1316–17, Kent Records Volume 13 (Canterbury: Kent Archaeology Society, 1933), xxii–iii.
70
Lloyd, The English Wool Trade, 111–12.
71
The National Archives UK, Kew: KB 9/1/1; KB 9/1/3; KB 9/2; KB 9/22/1; KB 9/22/2; KB 9/54A; KB 9/90; KB 9/114; KB 9/117; KB 9/163/1; KB 9/163/2; KB 9/163/3; KB 9/163/4; JUST 1/31; JUST 1/74; JUST 1/258; JUST 1/259; JUST 1/264; JUST 1/337; JUST 1/399; JUST 1/443; JUST 1/444; JUST 1/521 (B.W. McLane, ed., The 1341 Royal Inquest in Lincolnshire, Lincoln Record Society Volume 78 [Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1988]); JUST 1/549; JUST 1/550; JUST 1/552; JUST 1/691; JUST 1/715; JUST 1/716; JUST 1/770; JUST 1/771; JUST 1/858; JUST 1/859; JUST 1/1128; JUST 1/1141; JUST 1/1436; JUST 1/1548; JUST 1/1565; KB 27/307–401, Rex sides (covering Hilary term 1337 to Trinity term 1360); E 159/114–136, Recorda sections (covering Michaelmas term 1337 to Trinity term 1360) with inaccessible rolls supplemented by E 368/121 and E 368/122. The Exchequer plea rolls covering 1336–60 (E 13/64–E 13/82B) are of more limited use since cases where the king appeared as plaintiff were generally enrolled in the memoranda rolls (E 159; E 368). All are accessible on the Anglo-American Legal Tradition Web site created by R.C. Palmer, E.K. Palmer, and S. Jenks: http://aalt.law.uh.edu/AALT.html. Three of these rolls are noted in W.R. Jones, “Keeping the Peace: English Society, Local Government, and the Commissions of 1341–44,” American Journal of Legal History 18 (1974): 309 n. 7.
72
Calendar of Patent Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office: Edward III (1327–1377), 16 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1898–1913) (hereafter CPR, with dates): CPR 1334–38; CPR 1338–40; CPR 1340–43; CPR 1343–45; CPR 1345–48; CPR 1348–50; CPR 1350–54; CPR 1354–58. See also Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 62–63.
73
CPR 1340–43, 585–86.
74
PROME, IV: 333; CPR 1343–45, 97–98.
75
CPR 1350–54, 275, 289, 334, 514; CPR 1354–58, 125, 162, 163.
76
CPR 1354–58, 332. For Edward III's movements, see Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 624; and for this point more generally, see W.M. Ormrod, “Law in the Landscape: Criminality, Outlawry and Regional Identity in Late Medieval England,” in Boundaries of the Law: Geography, Gender and Jurisdiction in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. A. Musson (London: Routledge, 2005), 9–10.
77
KB 27/323, Rex side, rot. 16; and KB 27/324, Rex side, rot. 10d.
78
SC 8/245/12207; CPR 1343–45, 574.
79
Shareshull: CPR 1340–43, 452–53, 585–86; CPR 1343–45, 97–98, 190, 281–82, 286, 430; CPR 1345–48, 390; CPR 1348–50, 518. Parving: CPR 1340–43, 89, 94, 317, 318, 373, 485, 544, 585–86; CPR 1343–45, 97–98. Hillary: CPR 1340–43, 373, 585–86; CPR 1343–45, 97–98. For Shareshull's career, see B.H. Putnam, The Place in Legal History of Sir William Shareshull, Chief Justice of the King's Bench, 1350–1361 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950); for Parving and Hillary, see C. Kingsford and W.M. Ormrod, “Parning, Sir Robert (d. 1343), justice and administrator,” and J. Bothwell, “Hillary, Sir Roger (d. 1356), justice,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
80
For instance, CPR 1350–54, 514, 515, 523. For their careers, see H. Summerson, “Green, Sir Henry,” M. Jurkowsi, “Skipwith, Sir William,” and W.M. Ormrod, “Thorpe, Sir Robert,” in ODNB.
81
M. Hefferan, The Household Knights of Edward III: Warfare, Politics and Kingship in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021), 86–87.
82
A detailed account of the range of their activities and their important role in Edward III's kingship is provided in Hefferan, The Household Knights of Edward III.
83
A.K. McHardy, “King's Clerks: The Essential Tools of Government,” in Ruling Fourteenth-Century England, 59–76.
84
CPR 1338–40, 180.
85
JUST 1/550, rot. 1; CPR 1338–40, 175.
86
McLane, ed., The 1341 Royal Inquest in Lincolnshire, no. 936; CPR 1338–40, 187.
87
CPR 1338–40, 357, 368.
88
CPR 1345–48, 462–63. For Kelsey's wider career, see McHardy, “King's Clerks,” 61–62.
89
For the numbers of serjeants-at-arms, see C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King's Affinity: Service, Politics, and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1986), 22, 54; and R. Partington, “Edward III's Enforcers: The King's Sergeants-at-Arms in the Localities,” in The Age of Edward III, ed. J. Bothwell (York: York Medieval Press, 2001), 90–91.
90
Partington, “Edward III's Enforcers,” esp. 100–101, 105–6.
91
KB 27/342, Rex side, rot. 46.
92
Partington, “Edward III's Enforcers,” 99–104.
93
E 159/116, rot. 189d.
94
E 159/122, rot. 134; CPR 1343–45, 161; CPR 1350–54, 275.
95
CPR 1340–43, 210–11, 213, 216.
96
KB 9/22/1, nos, 6, 7, 10; JUST 1/259, rot. 3; JUST 1/264, rot. 4.
97
JUST 1/550, rots. 1, 6d; CPR 1340–43, 213, 216.
98
JUST 1/859, rot. 2, 2d; CPR 1340–43, 296, 317–18; Calendar of Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1341–43 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1902), 205.
99
Baker, “The English Customs Service,” 37 n. 29.
100
CPR 1340–43, 256–57; CPR 1348–50, 260; E 368/119, rot. 32, 32d.
101
KB 27/338, Rex side, rot. 63d; KB 27/339, Rex side, rots. 3, 34.
102
E 159/132, Recorda, Easter term, rot. 13; E 372/191, rot. 47; KB 27/347, Rex side, rot. 29, 29d.
103
KB 27/328, Rex side, rot. 21d; Calendar of Close Rolls 1341–43, 415.
104
Baker, “The English Customs Service,” 33–50; for instance, KB 27/341, Rex side, rot. 25.
105
JUST 1/550, rot. 3d; CPR 1354–58, 66; KB 27/338, Rex side, rot. 63 (the bailiff and warrener of the manor of Hollesley in Suffolk); J.B. Blake, “Medieval Smuggling in the North-East: Some Fourteenth-Century Evidence,” Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th ser., 43 (1965): 248–49, 256–57; and Ormrod, “The English Crown and the Customs,” 31. For the sheriff as “pivot,” see R. Gorski, The Fourteenth-Century Sheriff: English Local Administration in the Late Middle Ages (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), 160.
106
See the introductions to G.O. Sayles, ed., Select Cases in the Court of King's Bench, 7 vols., Selden Society Volumes 55, 57, 58, 74, 76, 82, and 88 (London: Selden Society, 1936–71) (hereafter SCCKB). For insightful syntheses, see Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 54–56; and A. Musson and W.M. Ormrod, The Evolution of English Justice: Law, Politics and Society in the Fourteenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 17–20.
107
For its jurisdictional development in English criminal matters, see SCCKB, II: xxxv–vii, xliv–li, lxiii–lxxi; IV: xxxv–lxxxvi; and Putnam, ed., Proceedings, lxiii–lxxii.
108
CPR 1340–43, 585–86; CPR 1343–45, 97–98; JUST 1/1141, rot. 19. For Scot's career, see H. Summerson, “Scott, Sir William (d. 1352x6),” in ODNB.
109
CPR 1343–45, 273–74, 421; KB 9/163, nos. 1, 2, 3, 4; JUST 1/1436; KB 27/341, Rex side, rots. 25, 37d.
110
CPR 1340–43, 320–21; KB 27/338, Rex side, rots. 1, 9, 9d, 34, 57d, 64; KB 27/340, Rex side, rot. 40, 40d; KB 27/342, Rex side, rot. 31d; KB 27/344, Rex side, rot. 30; KB 27/349, Rex side, rot. 22d; KB 27/372, Rex side, rot. 10. The last of these is noted in Ormrod, “The English Crown and the Customs,” 31.
111
W.R. Jones, “The Court of the Verge: The Jurisdiction of the Steward and Marshal of the Household in Later Medieval England,” Journal of British Studies 10 (1970): 1–29.
112
Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 199–201; and SCCKB, IV: xcvi–cv.
113
Putnam, Place in Legal History, 80, 134, 155; and SCCKB, IV: xxxviii–xlvi, lvii–lxi, lxxi–lxxxvi; VI: ix–xii.
114
Musson and Ormrod, Evolution of English Justice, 18–19.
115
KB 27/322, Rex side, rots. 33, 33d, 39, 39d, 41, 41d, 42, 44, 44d. For the merchants, see Fryde, Studies, XI.
116
KB 27/326, Rex side, rot. 44.
117
KB 27/334, fines; KB 27/334, Rex side, rots. 53d, 54, 60d, 62, 70, 71, 72 (the last three rots. are unnumbered: I have given them in sequence from the numeration up to that point in the roll); KB 27/335, fines; KB 27/335, Rex side, rots. 15d, 18d, 26.
118
KB 27/338, fines; KB 27/338, Rex side, rots. 52, 63, 63d, 64, 68, 68d.
119
The most detailed modern published account is H. Jenkinson and B.E.R. Formoy, eds., Select Cases in the Exchequer of Pleas, Selden Society Volume 48 (London: Selden Society, 1932), xi–cxxxvii, which covers the court up to 1307. An overview of the court's records and procedure is provided in R.M. Ball, “Exchequer of Pleas, Bills and Writs,” Journal of Legal History 9 (1998): 308–23. See also J.F. Trumpbour, “Litigation in the Court of Exchequer, 1307–1377” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1996).
120
Baker, “The English Customs Service,” 31.
121
JUST 1/550, rots. 9, 11, 11d; Calendar of Close Rolls 1343–46, 125; E 159/119, rot. 231.
122
E 159/119, rot. 191d; E 159/120, rot. 216; E 159/121, rot. 171; E 159/124, rot. 271d.
123
E 159/120, rot. 195, 195d.
124
Calendar of Close Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, A.D. 1343–46 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), 411; pursuant to C 61/49, m. 11. www.gasconrolls.org (accessed July 20, 2020).
125
E 159/122, rot. 146.
126
E 159/130, Recorda, Easter term, rot. 3; E 159/131, Recorda, Easter term, rots. 3d, 7.
127
E.B. Fryde, William de la Pole: Merchant and King's Banker (London: The Hambledon Press, 1988), 79–82.
128
E 159/117, rots. 184–89.
129
E 159/120, rots. 224, 225; E 159/124, rot. 183d.
130
E 159/129, Recorda, Trinity term, rots. 11d, 12; E 159/132, Recorda, Trinity term, passim; and Fryde, Studies, VI:16.
131
E 13/76–79; E 159/132, Recorda, Michaelmas term (unnumbered membranes); and Trumpbour, “Litigation in the Court of Exchequer,” 79–81.
132
E 13/79, rots. 122–6; Fryde, Studies, XII; and Fryde, William de la Pole, 215–26.
133
Ormrod, “The English Crown and the Customs,” 32.
134
E 13/79, rot. 107d.
135
E 159/134, Recorda, Easter term, rot. 3d.
136
E 13/82B, rot. 32.
137
Key works include: J.F. Baldwin, The King's Council in England during the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913); I.S. Leadam and J.F. Baldwin, eds., Select Cases before the King's Council, 1243–1482, Selden Society Volume 35 (London: Selden Society, 1918); W.M. Ormrod, “The Origins of the Sub Pena Writ,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 61 (1988): 11–20; and Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 74–7.
138
Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, 76–7.
139
For notes of warranty, see B. Wilkinson, “The Authorisation of Chancery Writs under Edward III,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 8 (1924): 107–39, esp. 117, 124–25; and A.L. Brown, “The Authorisation of Letters under the Great Seal,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 37 (1964): 149–51.
140
Calendar of Close Rolls 1343–46, 231.
141
A great deal of information on Kilsby and Edington at this time can be found in T.F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1920–33), III.
142
JUST 1/1141, rots. 11d, 18d.
143
Calendar of Close Rolls 1343–46, 382, 459; KB 27/336, Rex side, rot. 21. He was later pardoned for the export of uncustomed wool, among other offenses, by the king: CPR 1343–45, 257.
144
Ormrod, “Origins of the Sub Pena,” 15.
145
KB 27/323, Rex side, rot. 25. For the inter-relationship between the council and Chancery at this time, see Baldwin, The King's Council, 239–46; and B. Wilkinson, The Chancery under Edward III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1929), 41–47.
146
JUST 1/259, rot. 1; CPR 1340–43, 317.
147
JUST 1/259, rot. 2d.
148
Ormrod, “The English Crown and the Customs,” 32; E 368/125, rots. 35–43; E 13/81, rot. 41; E 13/82B, rot. 81; C 255/4/13, nos. 7, 8.
149
Generally on this premodern system, see C. Carpenter, “Political and Geographical Space: The Geopolitics of Medieval England,” in Political Space in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. B. Kümin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 117–34.
150
A. Vitória, “Late Medieval Polities and the Problem of Corruption: France, England and Portugal, 1250–1500,” and J. Watts, “The Problem of the Personal: Tackling Corruption in Later Medieval England, 1250–1550,” in Anticorruption in History: From Antiquity to the Modern Era, ed. R. Kroeze, A. Vitória, and G. Geltner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 77–90, 91–102.
151
Compare B.A. Hanawalt, “Fur-Collar Crime: The Pattern of Crime among the Fourteenth-Century English Nobility,” Journal of Social History 8 (1975): 1–17; R.W. Kaeuper, “Law and Order in Fourteenth-Century England: The Evidence of Special Commissions of Oyer and Terminer,” Speculum 54 (1979): 734–84; J.G. Bellamy, Crime and Public Order in England in the Later Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973); J.G. Bellamy, Criminal Law and Society in Late Medieval and Tudor England (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984); J.G. Bellamy, Bastard Feudalism and the Law (London: Routledge, 1989); M. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995), esp. 155–84; and C. Carpenter, “Bastard Feudalism in England in the Fourteenth Century,” in Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain, 1300–1625: Essays in Honour of Jenny Wormald, ed. S. Boardman and J. Goodare (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 63–64, 66–69, 76–86, 87–89.
152
Baker, “The English Customs Service,” 36–38, 42–43.
153
CPR 1340–43, 556; JUST 1/1141, rot. 1d. For the weighing process, see Baker, “The English Customs Service,” 7–8.
154
JUST 1/550, rot. 1; Calendar of Close Rolls 1341–43, 484; CPR 1340–43, 485, 544; and R.R. Sharpe, ed., Calendar of Letter-Books of the City of London: F, 1337–1352 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), 76. Both inquisitions were distinct from the short-lived London eyre of March 1341: JUST 1/549; JUST 1/552; Jones, “Keeping the Peace,” 309 n. 6.
155
O'Connor, “A Nest of Smugglers.”
156
JUST 1/550, rot. 1d.
157
O'Connor, “A Nest of Smugglers,” 302–3.
158
E 159/128, Recorda, Hilary term, rot. 8, 8d.
159
E 159/119, rot. 191d.
160
I.H. Jeayes and W.G. Benham, eds., Court Rolls of the Borough of Colchester, 3 vols. (Colchester: Town Council of the Borough of Colchester, 1921–41), I:89, 133, 172; and JUST 1/258, rots. 11, 13.
161
Jeayes and Benham, eds., Court Rolls of the Borough of Colchester, I:125, 133, 139, 144, 145, 147, 150, 156, 159, 163; and C 241/123/48.
162
KB 27/327, Rex side, rot. 25d; KB 27/328, Rex side, rot. 25.
163
KB 27/328, Rex side, rot. 29; KB 27/338, Rex side, rot. 50d.
164
KB 9/22/1, no. 11; KB 9/22/2, no. 10; JUST 1/259, rot. 3d. He was subsequently found not guilty.
165
Jeayes and Benhamp, eds., Court Rolls of the Borough of Colchester, I:133, 139, 147, 156.
166
KB 9/22/1, nos. 10, 11, 12; JUST 1/258, rots. 8, 11; JUST 1/259, rots. 1d, 2d, 3d; KB 27/323, Rex side, rot. 25.
167
KB 27/328, Rex side, rot. 24; KB 27/337, Rex side, rot. 13.
168
KB 9/22/1, no. 12; KB 9/22/2, nos. 89, 90; JUST 1/258, rots. 8d, 11; JUST 1/259, rots. 1d, 2, 3, 4d, 7d.
169
Davis, “Baking for the Common Good,” 467, 477–85, 495; and Seabourne, Royal Regulation, 20–23, 117–21.
170
Sharp, Famine and Scarcity, 2, 3, 45–46, 77–85, 103–4, 120–21, 127–29, 144–45, 189–95.
171
See, for example, J. Ferguson, ed., Treaty Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, 1337–1339 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972), 46–47.
172
Luders et al., eds., Statutes of the Realm, I:288, 289.
173
See, for example, Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 420–49; G.L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 59–60. This process is outlined in Section II.
174
For comment, see L.K. Little, “Pride goes before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 16–59; Davis, Medieval Market Morality, 49–64, 83–95; and J. Hole, Economic Ethics in Late Medieval England, 1300–1500 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 62–9.
175
Reproduced in S. Rose, The Wealth of England: The Medieval Wool Trade and its Political Importance, 1100–1600 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2018), fig. 28.
176
See SCCKB, I:29 (KB 27/26, rot. 11d) for an attack on a collector of the new custom of 1275.
177
Calendar of Fine Rolls 1327–37, 404, 414. This is pointed out in F. Barnes, “The Taxation of Wool, 1327–1348,” in Finance and Trade under Edward III, 141.
178
Maddicott, “English Peasantry,” 329–36.
179
W.M. Ormrod, “Government Records: Fiscality, Archives and the Economic Historian,” in Dove Va la Storia Economica? Metodi e Prospettive, Secc. XII–XVIII, ed. F. Ammannati (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2011), 217–18.
180
D. Boucoyannis, Kings as Judges: Power, Justice, and the Origins of Parliaments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 95, 144–47. This makes use of estimates for population size and GDP in S. Broadberry, B.M.S. Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton, and B. van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth, 1270–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
181
A magisterial synthesis of these factors is provided in B.M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 160–98. Notably, numerous studies utilizing a range of methodologies and metrics identify this period as one of relative hardship: C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 118–29; M. Bailey, “Peasant Welfare in England, 1290–1348,” Economic History Review, new ser., 51 (1998): 239–42, 247; H. Kitsikopoulos, “Standards of Living and Capital Formation in Pre-Plague England: A Peasant Budget Model,” Economic History Review, new ser., 53 (2000): 237–61; Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth, 1270–1870, 251–52, 258, 273–74, 290–91, 312–13, 330–31, 402–3, 420–22; A.R. Bell, C. Brooks, and H. Killick, “A Reappraisal of the Freehold Property Market in Late Medieval England,” Continuity and Change 34 (2019): 293–98; P. Slavin, Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019); J. Humphries and J. Weisdorf, “Unreal Wages? Real Income and Economic Growth in England, 1260–1850,” Economic Journal 129 (2019): 2873–74, 2877, 2879–80, 2884; S. Horrell, J. Humphries, and J. Weisdorf, “Family Standards of Living over the Long Run, England 1280–1850,” Past & Present 250 (2021): 97, 101–7, 117–18, 127, 131; and S. Horrell, J. Humphries, and J. Weisdorf, “Beyond the Male Breadwinner: Life-cycle Living Standards of Intact and Disrupted English Working Families, 1260–1850,” Economic History Review, new ser., 75 (2022): 530–60.
182
The limits of the effectiveness of the justifications of taxation imposed on the wool trade in particular are suggested in A. Ruddick, English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 205–6.
183
E. Miller and J. Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086–1348 (London: Longman, 1978), 282; M. Mate, “The Impact of War on the Economy of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, 1294–1340,” Speculum 57 (1982): 766, 776; D. Stone, Decision-Making in Medieval Agriculture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76–77, 235–40; J. Langdon and J. Masschaele, “Commercial Activity and Population Growth in Medieval England,” Past & Present 190 (2006): 74–75; M.J. Stephenson, “Risk and Capital Formation: Seigneurial Investment in an Age of Adversity,” in Town and Countryside in the Age of the Black Death: Essays in Honour of John Hatcher, ed. M. Bailey and S.H. Rigby (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 180–81. Compare, however, M. Kowaleski, “Warfare, Shipping, and Crown Patronage: The Economic Impact of the Hundred Years War on the English Port Towns,” in Money, Markets and Trade in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of John H.A. Munro, ed. L. Armstrong, I. Elbl, and M.M. Elbl (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 248–49, noting that sustained naval conflict stimulated investment in shipbuilding.
184
E.B. Fryde, “Parliament and the French War, 1336–40,” repr. in Historical Studies of the English Parliament, ed. E.B. Fryde and E. Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), I:242–61.
185
Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 420.
186
R. Mccallum, “The Crown's Ecclesiastical Creditors: Loans from the English Church to Edward II and Edward III, 1307–1377,” English Historical Review 137 (2021): 1399, citing SC 1/55/120; SC 1/38/124.
187
Adam Murimuth, Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E.M. Thompson (London: Adam Murimuth, Continuatio Chronicarum, 1889), 80: “For this reason, the king caused all the wools of his kingdom, of any quantity, to be taken into his hand from the unwilling populace in return for a low price, in accordance with a certain plan agreed between the merchants” (Propter quod ipse rex fecit capere ad manum suam omnes lanas regni sui, alicujus quantitatis, sub certa forma inter mercatores conventa, pro modico pretio, ab invitis). Ibid., 85: “ . . . wool was granted to the lord king by those who were present [at this assembly], to the great burden of the people” ( . . . concessa fuit lana domino regi per eos qui fuerunt praesentes, ad gravissimum onus populi).
188
T.H. Lloyd, “Overseas Trade and the English Money Supply in the Fourteenth Century,” in Edwardian Monetary Affairs (1279–1344), ed. N.J. Mayhew, British Archaeological Reports 36 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports Publishing, 1977), 109. For examples of this practice, see SC 8/80/3977; SC 8/40/1957.
189
See P. Nightingale, “Knights and Merchants: Trade, Politics and the Gentry in Late Medieval England,” Past & Present 169 (2000): 50–51.
190
PROME, IV:327, 339–40.
191
J.R. Maddicott, “Poems of Social Protest in Early Fourteenth-Century England,” in England in the Fourteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1986), 330–44; and C. Revard, “Political Poems in MS Harley 2253 and the English National Crisis of 1339–41,” Chaucer Review 53 (2018): 60–81. More broadly, see W. Scase, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–1553 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
192
I.T. Aspin, ed., Anglo-Norman Political Songs, Anglo-Norman Text Society Volume 11 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Anglo–Norman Text Society, 1953), 110–15; and D.B. Tyson, “Against the King's Taxes: The Second Manuscript,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 54 (2010): 73–92.
193
Aspin, ed., Anglo-Norman Political Songs, 112–13. In British Library MS Additional 10374, “Non leges sanas teneo regi dare lanas,” with essentially the same meaning: Tyson, “Against the King's Taxes,” 80–81.
194
N. Ker, ed., Facsimile of British Museum MS. Harley 2253, Early English Text Society Volume 225 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1965), xxi n. 6.
195
Johnson, Law in Common. See also R. Houston, “People, Space, and Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain and Ireland,” Past & Present 230 (2016): 47–89; and, for an important “bottom-up” study of the legal system, P.R. Hyams, “What did Edwardian Villagers understand by ‛Law’?” in Medieval Society and the Manor Court, ed. Z. Razi and R. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 69–102.
196
See Seabourne, Royal Regulation, 7, 166–67, for an incisive discussion of “central” and “local” that draws attention to the importance of the enforcement process in this context. See also A. Taylor, The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124–1290 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 20, for an argument “that the fundamental comparative dynamic to be used when analysing the various forms of medieval state is not that between public power and private power but between centrally based institutions and locally based ones.”
197
Britnell, “Forestalling”; Davis, “Baking for the Common Good,” esp. 480–85; Seabourne, Royal Regulation, 23–24, 80–81, 123, 126; and Davis, Medieval Market Morality, 143–44.
198
J.T. Rosenthal, “The Assizes of Weights and Measures in Medieval England,” Western Political Quarterly 17 (1964): 415–21; Britnell, “Forestalling,” 101–2; R.H. Hilton, “Lords, Burgesses and Hucksters,” Past & Present 97 (1982): 8–9; R. Britnell, “Price-Setting in English Borough Markets, 1349–1500,” Canadian Journal of History 31 (1996): 1–15; Seabourne, Royal Regulation, 140–4, 147–9; G. Seabourne, “Assize Matters: Regulation of the Price of Bread in Medieval London,” Journal of Legal History 27 (2006): 38–43; Davis, Medieval Market Morality, 147–50, 176, 193–94, 233, 237, 244–48, 251–53, 256, 297–303, 274–407; Briggs, “Peasants, Lords, and Commerce,” 251, 259–67; and Slavin, Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain, 134–46. Although note Seabourne, Royal Regulation, 89–91, 95–97, 162–63.
199
Davis, “Baking for the Common Good,” 488.
200
For the direction of complaints against forestallers to the relevant local sheriffs and bailiffs, see W.M. Ormrod, H. Killick, and P. Bradford, eds., Early Common Petitions in the English Parliament, c.1290–c.1420, Camden Society Fifth Series Volume 52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), no. 74 (133–35). This petition is ascribed to the reign of Edward II by the editors, primarily on the basis of the hand.
201
M. Bailey, After the Black Death: Economy, Society, and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 81.
202
Ormrod, Killick, and Bradford, eds., Early Common Petitions, no. 62 (111–13): “Wherefore the said good people pray to our said lord the king, if it pleases him, that delivery of the aforesaid indicted people might be made in the county in which the indictment is made, for the relief of the county, and so that the good people and the well-respected men of the county are able to present for the said delivery” (Par quey priount les ditz bones gentz a nostre dit seignur le Roi si luy plest qe la deliverance des avantditz endites puisse estre fait en pays la ou l'enditement se firent pur esement du pays et qe les bones gentz du pays et les muth vanes puissent estrea la dite deliverance . . . ).
203
PROME, V:396, 434. See also Sharp, Famine and Scarcity, 99–101.
204
This subject is discussed with reference to the early 1340s in Waugh, “Success and Failure of the Medieval Constitution,” with previous studies cited, and common fines tabulated at 160 (Table 1.2).
205
Calendar of Close Rolls 1341–43, 346. Sources for other fines are given in Waugh, “Success and Failure of the Medieval Constitution,” 143 n. 108.
206
Murimuth, Continuatio Chronicarum, 118. See also J.G. Aungier, ed., Chroniques de London, Camden Society, First Series Volume 28 (London: John Bowyer Nichols and Son for the Camden Society, 1844), 89.
207
SCCKB, VI:37–38. For comment, see D. Rollison, A Commonwealth of People: Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 211–14.
208
PROME, IV:434. See also Waugh, “Success and Failure of the Medieval Constitution,” 137–40.
209
PROME, IV:311–12, 316–17, 323, 364, 366; Luders et al., eds., Statutes of the Realm, I:300–1; Waugh, “Success and Failure of the Medieval Constitution,” 139.
210
Compare the novelty of the enforcement of a new statute concerning weights and measures in the King's Bench in 1352: Putnam, Place in Legal History, 72–73.
211
Sharp, Famine and Scarcity, 57.
212
JUST 1/612/5; and Sharp, Famine and Scarcity, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 64–65, 74, 77–78.
213
For the rex side, see SCCKB, IV:xlvi–li, cvii, cix–x; and J.H. Baker, Introduction to English Legal History, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 45–46; and compare the overview of cases given in M.S. Arnold, ed., Select Cases of Trespass from the King's Courts, 1307–1399, 2 vols., Selden Society Volumes 100 and 103 (London: Selden Society, 1984–87), I:xxxii–lxxxv.
214
The classic example of this is the case of Rattlesdene v. Grunestone (1317), which is translated in J.H. Baker, ed., Baker and Milsom. Sources of English Legal History: Private Law to 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 341.
215
T. Johnson, “The Tree and the Rod: Jurisdiction in Late Medieval England,” Past & Present 237 (2017): 13–51.
216
For trespass and trespass-on-the-case, see S.F.C. Milsom, “Trespass from Henry III to Edward III – Part III: More Special Writs and Conclusions,” Law Quarterly Review 74 (1958): 583–90; S.F.C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law, 2nd ed. (London: Butterworths, 1981), 283–313; R.C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348–1381 (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 217–93, 295–96, 303; and C. Archan, “L'apparition de trespass on the case: l’état de l'historiographie,” in La culture judiciaire anglaise au Moyen Âge, ed. Y. Mausen (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2017), 155–66.
217
For usury and forestalling, see Seabourne, Royal Regulation of Loans and Sales, 44–55, 145, 185–89.
218
For the importance of private bills, see Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 67–68; and A. Musson, “Twelve Good Men and True? The Character of Early Fourteenth-Century Juries,” Law and History Review 15 (1997): 120–21.
219
P. Brand, “Courtroom and Schoolroom: The Education of Lawyers in England prior to 1400,” Historical Research 60 (1987): 147–65; P. Brand, “Inside the Courtroom: Lawyers, Litigants and Justices in England in the Later Middle Ages,” in The Moral World of the Law, ed. P. Coss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for Past & Present Publications, 2000), 107–11; W.M. Ormrod, “The Use of English: Language, Law, and Political Culture in Fourteenth-Century England,” Speculum 78 (2003): 75–87; P. Brand, ed., The Earliest English Law Reports, 4 vols., Selden Society Volumes 111, 112, 122, and 123 (London: Selden Society, 1996–2006), IV:xxxii–xxxviii; and J.H. Baker, “The Three Languages of the Common Law,” in J.H. Baker, Collected Papers on English Legal History, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), II:525–46.
220
J.H. Baker, “English Judges’ Robes 1350–2008,” in Baker, Collected Papers, II:822–41; and A. Musson, “Visualising Legal History: The Courts and Legal Profession in Image,” in English Legal History and its Sources: Essays in Honour of Sir John Baker, ed. D. Ibbetson, N. Jones, and N. Ramsay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 203–22.
221
A. Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 36–83. This differentiation of legal professionalism was far from an isolated phenomenon, of course: N. Luhmann, A Sociological Theory of Law, 2nd ed., trans. E. King-Utz and M. Albrow (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 139–41; and S. Reynolds, “The Emergence of Professional Law in the Long Twelfth Century,” Law and History Review 21 (2003): 347–66.
222
D. Delaney, “Tracing Displacements: or Evictions in the Nomosphere,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (2004): 847–60, esp. 851–52, 859; D. Delaney, The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-Making: Nomospheric Investigations (New York: Routledge, 2010); and A. Jeffrey, “Legal Geography I: Court Materiality,” Progress in Human Geography 43 (2019): 568.
223
See also T. Johnson, “Legal History and the Material Turn,” in The Oxford Handbook of Legal History, ed. M.D. Dubber and C. Tomlins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 498–513.
224
SC 8/261/13003; SC 8/65/3209. The former is printed in C.M. Fraser, ed., Ancient Petitions relating to Northumberland, Surtees Society Volume 176 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1966), 218–19.
225
W.M. Ormrod, “Parliament, Political Economy and State Formation in Later Medieval England,” in Power and Persuasion: Essays on the Art of State Building in Honour of W.P. Blockmans, ed. P. Hoppenbrouwers, A. Janse, and R. Stein (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 132–33.
226
KB 27/338, Rex side, rots. 9, 9d, 34, 57d, 64. For practical complaints regarding the accessibility of royal court venues, see P. Brand, “The Travails of Travel: The Difficulties of Getting to Court in Later Medieval England,” in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages, ed. P. Horden (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), 215–28; and A. Musson, “Court Venues and the Politics of Justice,” in Fourteenth Century England V, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008), 170–73.
227
For relative population densities by county, see B.M.S. Campbell and K. Bartley, England on the Eve of the Black Death: An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land and Wealth, 1300–49 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 330–31 (Table 18.3).
228
JUST 1/770, rot. 1 (pursuant to CPR 1340–43, 106); JUST 1/771, rots. 1, 9 (pursuant to CPR 1343–45, 281–82).
229
For instance, JUST 1/770, rots. 9d, 11, 12, 13.
230
JUST 1/771.
231
JUST 1/399; JUST 1/1565.
232
For instance, KB 27/327, Rex side, rot. 38.
233
KB 27/339, Rex side.
234
KB 27/366, fines; KB 27/366, Rex side; KB 27/369, fines; KB 27/269, Rex side.
235
JUST 1/858, rots. 3d, 5, 10d, 29; and Waugh, “Success and Failure of the Medieval Constitution,” 140.
236
McLane, ed., The 1341 Royal Inquest in Lincolnshire, xxv, xxix.
237
See also the suggestion that cases of fraud may only have come to light when local social and/or commercial relations had broken down, made in C. Tazzara, “Against the Fisc and Justice: State Formation, Market Development, and Customs Fraud in Seventeenth-Century Liguria,” in The Routledge History of the Renaissance, ed. William Caferro (Routledge: New York, 2017), 358–72.
238
O'Connor, “A Nest of Smugglers,” 299.
239
For York's merchants at this time, see C.D. Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns: Bristol, York and the Crown, 1350–1400 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2005), 120–23; and P. Nightingale, “The Rise and Decline of Medieval York: A Reassessment,” Past & Present 206 (2010): 14–18.
240
T. Hodgkin, “Municipal Contests in Newcastle, 1342–1345,” Archaeologia Aeliana, 3rd ser., 5 (1909): 1–15; and C.M. Fraser, “The Life and Death of John Denton,” Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th ser., 37 (1959): 303–25.
241
CPR 1343–45, 44; E 159/119, rot. 191d.
242
See I. Forrest, Trustworthy Men: How Inequality and Faith Made the Medieval Church (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018) for such “very local elites”; along with Masschaele, Jury, State, and Society, 123–97; P. Larson, “Village Voice or Village Oligarchy? The Jurors of the Durham Halmote Court, 1349 to 1424,” Law and History Review 28 (2010): 675–709; and Musson, “Twelve Good Men and True?” 126–29.
243
For this instance in 1414, see Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 201–8.
244
E 159/117, rot. 187; CPR 1343–45, 273–74; CPR 1345–48, 455, 462–63; JUST 1/1548, nos. 2d, 3 (calendars of presentment jurors with mariners demarcated by marginal annotations).
245
Musson, “Twelve Good Men and True?” 116.
246
JUST 1/1548, no. 2; E 159/121, rot. 171. For the commissions to the justices, see CPR 1343–45, 273–74, 294. For overlap between presentment juries and trial juries in the early to mid-fourteenth century, see Musson, “Twelve Good Men and True?” 135–41.
247
B.W. McLane, “Juror Attitudes toward Local Disorder: The Evidence of the 1328 Lincolnshire Trailbaston Proceedings,” in Twelve Good Men and True, ed. J.S. Cockburn and T.A. Green (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 36–64. This built on important work into jury nullification in homicide cases by T.A. Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 28–64. See also Baker, Introduction to English Legal History, 558–60.
248
For the position of juries, see Arnold, ed., Select Cases of Trespass, I: xxix–xxxi; E. Papp Kamali, Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 259–62; and, most recently, H. Summerson, “Hanging Matters: Petty Theft, Sentence of Death, and a Lost Statute of Edward I,” Law and History Review 40 (2022): 149–64. This has been contrasted to civil litigation: P. Brand, “Judges and Juries in Civil Litigation in Later Medieval England: The Millon Thesis Reconsidered,” Journal of Legal History 37 (2016): esp. 39–40.
249
McLane, “Juror Attitudes,” 55.
250
J.B. Post, “Crime in Later Medieval England: Some Historiographical Limitations,” Continuity and Change 2 (1987): 214.
251
Drawing on the classic work of J.C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). See also S.H. Rigby, “History, Discourse, and the Postsocial Paradigm: A Revolution in Historiography?” History and Theory 45 (2006): 120. The desire to lower transaction costs is emphasized in Raven, “Wool Smuggling from England's Eastern Seaboard.”
252
Compare the analysis of other local commissions in Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society, 16–17, 19–20; A. Musson, Public Order and Law Enforcement: The Local Administration of Criminal Justice, 1294–1350 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1996), 49–82, 225–56; Waugh, “Success and Failure of the Medieval Constitution,” 130–1; and Carpenter, “Bastard Feudalism in England,” 83–86.
253
As emphasized in A. Musson, “Centre and Locality: Perceptions of the Assize Justices in Late Medieval England,” in Law, Governance, and Justice, 224–37.
254
S. Walker, “Order and Law,” in A Social History of England, 1200–1500, ed. R. Horrox and W.M. Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 109–10. See also Musson, “Twelve Good Men and True?” 141–42.
255
Ormrod, “Law in the Landscape,” 16.
256
Harriss, G.L., “Political Society and the Growth of Government in Late Medieval England,” Past & Present 138 (1993): 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
257
Rigby, S.H., “The Customs Administration at Boston in the Reign of Richard II,” Historical Research 58 (1985): 12–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lloyd, Medieval English Wool Trade, 210–24.
258
S.H. Rigby, ed., The Overseas Trade of Boston in the Reign of Richard II, Lincoln Record Society Volume 93 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), xxxv–vi; S. Rose, Calais: An English Town in France, 1347–1558 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008), 40–53. For the financial relationship between the Company of the Staple and the crown, see E. Power, “The Wool Trade in the Fifteenth Century,” in Studies in English Trade in the 15th Century, ed. E. Power and M.M. Postan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1933), 74; A. Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 197 n. 1, 208–9, 211, 214, 219, 225, 230, 235, 237, 264–6; Grummitt, D., “The Financial Administration of Calais during the Reign of Henry IV, 1399–1413,” English Historical Review 113 (1998): 277–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
259
Elton, G.R., “Informing for Profit: A Sidelight on Tudor Methods of Law-Enforcement,” Cambridge Historical Journal 11 (1954): 159, 164–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J.A. Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750 (London: Routledge, 1999), 150–1; Chan Smith, “Fair Trade and the Political Economy,” 89, 92–3.
