The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (35 page)

to warrant calling out the
posse comitatus:
a group of armed men who will pursue the criminal until he is caught. In such cases, a criminal evading arrest may be beheaded on sight—provided the coroner is present and provided the wanted man has not reached the sanctuary of a church. Alternatively, if the thief apprehended is a woman, she may be taken to a river and forcibly drowned for resisting arrest. This ancient system of law and order is codified at the end of the thirteenth century by Edward I in various statutes, most notably in the Statute of Winchester (1285). This stipulates that, if a robbery is committed, the criminal must be pursued from town to town. It also orders that city and town gates are closed at sundown and opened again at sunrise, and that there are to be watches in every settlement. The number of men who must keep watch in each place varies: there must be six watchmen for every gate in a city, twelve watchmen in every other borough, and either six or four men to watch in every town (according to its population). London, a special case, has six watchmen in each of its twenty-five wards and a further six on each gate: nearly two hundred watchmen. Every stranger who lodges in a region becomes the responsibility of his host. Every person found out of doors at night is liable to be arrested. The intention is that every effort is made by members of a community to keep the king’s peace.

The sheriff is the king’s chief officer in a county. He receives the king’s writs—about 120 of them every month in an average-size county—and carries out the king’s orders. These might be to summon a jury to try a particular case or to arrest someone. They might require him to send an indicted man or woman to the royal courts, or to make an inquiry into damage and report back to the king, or to hold an election to send two representatives to Parliament. In times of war the sheriff might be ordered to gather men to fight in Scotland or France. The sheriff is also expected to make arrangements to feed such fighting men—not an easy business when he is ordered to gather two thousand archers. He thus has heavy financial responsibilities and has to account for them at the Exchequer. He is also expected to maintain the country gaol and to build wooden cages in the castle yard when the prisons are full.

As you can see, a huge amount of power is vested in the sheriff. He may arrest you, imprison you, and send you in chains to London. Few people will be able to stop him if he chooses to extort money from you or decides to torture you. Ironically, the one thing he cannot do is try you for a serious crime. Apart from matters of small consequence, such as debts or brawling, the only time a sheriff can legally act as a judge himself is when he catches someone trying to evade the law—for instance a man who tries to escape from gaol (whom he may behead), or a thief caught red-handed (whom he may also behead, or drown in the case of a woman). Even in these cases he may only proceed to justice if the coroner is present. In this sense, the sheriff and his bailiffs, combined with the constables of the townships and the chief tithing-men, are the equivalent of a police force. Just as modern policemen do not actually try the criminals they catch, so too the sheriffs, bailiffs, constables, and chief tithing-men have to leave all the serious cases to judges sent out from London or local justices of the peace.

The sheriff is obliged to hold several courts, most notably the county court, which is held every four or six weeks. Much of the business dealt with is routine: the swearing-in of officers, the announcement of royal proclamations, and the ordering of inquiries into trespasses. The county court also acts as a small claims court: men may sue one another for sums of up to £2. It undertakes preliminary hearings of Crown pleas, referring these where necessary to the royal courts. And it serves as the court at which men are declared outlaws. If a criminal is at large, he is summoned to the county court. If he fails to appear four times, he is declared an outlaw on the fifth occasion. Thereafter he may be beheaded on sight.

The county court also may proceed to justice through a “trial by battle.” If you are the victim of a serious crime (like rape, serious wounding, or arson) and you appear in court personally, you can “appeal” your assailant of the crime. You or your representative may then fight the accused—or his representative—to determine his guilt or innocence. You might be surprised to hear that this also applies to disputes concerning land. Several monasteries have cause to thank men who triumphantly represent them in cases concerning their rights.

Each hundred holds a court every three weeks. The bailiff empanels a jury of twelve freemen to hear all the presentments. Many cases are the consequences of fights. If a man draws blood, this needs to be reported at the hundred court. Other ordinary business includes relatively minor trespasses such as fraud, disputes over small debts, and thefts of household goods and animals. Punishments are almost always fines, varying from place to place. As a rule of thumb, expect to pay between 6d and a shilling for starting a fight, 2s or more for drawing blood (although note that most towns have higher fines for this), and 6d for unnecessarily raising the hue and cry. Of course, if anyone has been caught grievously wounding someone, or killing them, or raping a woman, he will be arrested, to await a special hundred court: the sheriff’s “tourn.”

The important thing to remember about hundred courts is that they cross jurisdictions. Manorial business can be dealt with in a manorial court, so if a villein allows a stream across his land to get clogged with detritus, causing a flood, the manorial officers can force him to unblock it. However, if the flood damages property on the
next
manor, or blocks the king’s highway, the case needs to move up the scale, to the hundred court. Similarly, while tithings are adequate means of controlling villeins, freemen are outside the frankpledge system. The hundred court is where freemen’s misdemeanors need to be reported and where cases of their debts and the fights they have caused can be dealt with. So, if a freeman has stolen your cattle, or has failed to repay a debt and has sufficient animals to cover the sum, you can expect to see the hundred bailiff arresting him, or leading his cattle away, until the matter is settled.

Twice a year, normally at Easter and Michaelmas, the sheriff’s tourn comes to the hundred. The purpose of the sheriff’s appearance in these enlarged hundred courts is to receive those indictments which need to be presented to the royal judges and to make sure all indicted felons are taken into custody. Massive fines—£10 or even more—might be levied on tithings when their members are found not to have reported the misdoings of one of their members. It does not take a brilliant legal mind to see that the modern idea that villeins all stick together like a band of brothers against the dominant lords of
manors is not universally true. Those men and women swinging on the gallows might be arrested by the sheriff and his bailiffs but only after they have been reported by their fellow tithing-men. More often than not, the chief tithing-man and the village constable will make the arrest, to avoid the tithing being fined heavily at a sheriff’s tourn for failing to do so.

Now you can see how there come to be so many people brought to justice in the days before police forces. If you, a stranger in this country, are seen in a village at the same time as a burglary is discovered, and the hue and cry is raised, you might be arrested by the local people. You will then be handed over as a suspected felon to the local tithing-man and constable who will personally take you back to your home village and hand you over to the local constable there. In your case this is going to be a little difficult, so the constable will simply lock you in the village prison or stocks (the means of trapping people by their legs) until he can present you at a tourn or take you to the county town, where the sheriff’s gaol is situated.
⁴
There you will remain, in the pit or cellar set aside for felons, or in the wooden cages outside that serve as temporary cells, unless you can obtain bail. The next time the royal judges come to the county, a jury will try you and either hang you or let you go, depending on what they hear of your reputation. You may have to wait months in prison before that day of “justice” arrives. This also applies to women, who are not given any special treatment or protection. One woman accused of stealing a lady’s jewels is locked up in Guildford Gaol “with all the other thieves of the county” for forty-seven weeks before a jury finds her innocent of all charges.
⁵

A surprisingly large number of indicted men choose to accuse other people of crimes, or of complicity in their own crime. This system is known as “approving.” When a condemned man is brought out of his wooden cell or the common pit, and dragged before the judges who are going to try him, he accuses his enemies by way of “appeal.” He is then taken off to be hanged. Notwithstanding his death, writs go out to empanel juries to try those he has accused. It is a shocking system. If you are a criminal and you know you are going to die, then why not accuse your enemies of complicity in your crimes when you face the judges? If your enemies are found guilty, they too will hang. Similarly, if you are going to die anyway, and your gaoler promises you that he
will treat you better in your last days if you appeal one of
his
enemies, then what have you got to lose?
⁶
At Salisbury in the first decade of the century, one Roger Prye is arrested on suspicion of larceny. He confesses before the coroner, so he knows he is going to hang. But, having done so, he then turns approver and appeals Henry the Baker and Eve his wife of receiving him after he stole fourteen bushels of the abbot of Glastonbury’s wheat. Prye is then hanged, but Henry and Eve are dragged in and charged with sheltering him. They plead not guilty, and a jury from the area is empaneled to try them. Fortunately, the jury considers them not guilty, so they are let go.
⁷
You can see how important it is to be considered of good character in your hometown. If your enemies accuse you, often it will only be your good reputation which saves you from the gallows.

Local justice is designed to find somebody guilty; it does not necessarily follow that that somebody is the person responsible for the crime in question. If you begin to look at those who are indicted of serious crimes, it soon becomes apparent that many of them are strangers. In some places as many as 30 percent of all suspected murderers and thieves are described as vagrants.
⁸
How guilty all these men are is a moot point; many of them have probably been accused simply because the people who live in a village are cautious of strangers, and fearful of them, and thus very quick to point the finger at them when a crime is committed. There is a lot of false justice in the country. Just as some men are wrongly accused, others are wrongly acquitted. You even have a few cases in which murderers can be arrested and get off scot-free, having killed an innocent man to prove their own innocence. This sounds completely daft, but it happens. If one man is accused of a murder, and pleads not guilty but appeals an “accomplice” of involvement, he may end up fighting a judicial combat—trial by battle—with him to determine his guilt. If he defeats his opponent, he is deemed to be guiltless of the original offense and may go free.

Bad justice sometimes arises from those who administer the law. There are 628 hundreds in medieval England; but only 270 of them are in royal lordship. That leaves 358 in lords’ hands.
⁹
Many of these private hundreds allow the sheriff and his bailiffs access to their courts,
so the sheriff can hold his tourns in the same way as he would in a royal hundred. But some lords of private hundreds have the right to refuse the sheriff access. It is not quite accurate to say that in such places the king’s writ does not run, but it is the lord of the hundred who receives those writs, not the sheriff, and it is the lord who takes responsibility for enacting the king’s orders. Such lords hold their own courts, hold their own equivalent of tourns, and sometimes even appoint their own coroners. They often have the right to hang felons as well. The bailiff of such a hundred can hang those whom he chooses at will, provided the coroner is present. It is very unlikely that anyone will stop him.