7/30/2023 0 Comments Life in medieval europe”So the lords are actually maintaining this hugely important system. “What we’ve shown is that it looks like the amount of money that was needed for the costs of keeping the animal for a year and a day actually outstripped its value,” he says. While it might appear that the lords could easily profit from such a system, Dr Gibbs, in collaboration with his colleague Dr Jordan Claridge, argues that this is not necessarily the case. The lord could gain if the animal was not reclaimed in the time period” says Dr Gibbs. “This gave the owner time to track down their animal, but it also gave an incentive for people to hand stray animals in. In reality, however, they would often sell it to the person who found the animal a year earlier. The lord would look after that animal for a year and a day, and if the owner had not collected it during that period, it would be claimed by the lord. Anyone who found a stray animal was required to report it to the lord’s court. To help manage this problem, the courts developed a system that provided potential benefit to both the lords and the peasants on their land. “If your horse got free it could do a lot of damage in quite a short amount of time, which could be pretty devastating,” Dr Gibbs says. One illustration of the ways that lords and tenants were able to work with the court system to mutual benefit is in the handling of stray animals, a problem at the time as fields were open with no fences. If your horse got free it could do a lot of damage in quite a short amount of time, which could be pretty devastating. I think particularly they were willing to collaborate with their elite tenants a lot to make the system work.” Healthy villages helped them to maintain their power. “On a day-to-day basis,” he says, “the lords were aware that they wanted productive tenants, and that they would benefit from tenants who could pay their rents and who were economically viable. While Dr Gibbs is keen to stress that this was by no means an easy life for tenants, his research has found that the lords were savvy enough to understand that a collaborative relationship could benefit them both. “Instead of this conflict model between lords and tenants that has been argued in the past, with tenants trying to get out of doing what the lord wants them to do, I found that actually these people were quite happy to collaborate with their lords.” So they saw value in the courts as a community rather than something that was simply imposed on them by their feudal lords. “They could be used by local communities to fulfil a large array of functions and as a result, the people considered them useful. “Manor courts remained important from the 1300s to the 17th century, and that’s partly because they were very flexible” Dr Gibbs explains. ![]() Instead of this conflict model between lords and tenants, I found that people were quite happy to collaborate with their lords.Īlthough today’s court system bears no resemblance to that of medieval times, the system remained a powerful force in rural England for centuries, partially because of their connections to the everyday lives of those they oversaw. And so, previous Marxist theory has been that the system was primarily a tool to enable lords to impose their will on tenants, often in an exploitative way.” ![]() If you were a servile person you had to pay if you got married by working on your lord’s land for example. “But these manor courts also imposed the power of feudal lords in society. “These are all important issues to small village communities,” says Dr Gibbs. Found in many villages across the country, these small and very local institutions of government oversaw day-to-day issues such as ensuring access to resources, dealing with petty criminality such as assaults, and overseeing land transfers. He has been examining the manor court system in England from the 1300s to the 17th century. Manor court records are a good mirror into the realities of life in rural England, believes Dr Spike Gibbs. Land, village life and petty crime: the workings of the medieval legal system But examination of the records of manor courts has revealed a much more nuanced relationship between local rulers and those living on their land. Medieval England is often characterised in books or film as one of extremes, where serfs toil the land while lords greedily profit from their labour.
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