El sistema financiero a finales de la Edad Media: instrumentos y métodos. AAVV

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СКАЧАТЬ was especially prevalent, there was both an identified process for overseeing litigation and for allowing litigants, and especially plaintiffs, to bring their cases to court with reasonable confidence that the court would offer an effective forum for a satisfactory resolution of their dispute. It is important to note in this respect, therefore, that the court was, especially in the case of inter-personal litigation, open to the influence not only of the lord and his officials but also of the litigants and potential litigants themselves. If, from the point of view of the lord, his court was to be an attractive venue in which wealthy litigants would sue and, thereby, enhance his seigneurial revenue through the fines, amercements and the associated business that came into his court as a result it needed to be a suitable and trustworthy forum for those litigants.

       Non-peasant litigants in debt cases in the manor court

Undoubtedly, a great deal of lending and borrowing at the level of the medieval village took place between villagers and a high proportion of such agreement did not end up as litigation in manorial or other courts. Chris Briggs’ work has illustrated the evident tendency for the majority of credit agreements which led to debt litigation in the manorial court to be small in scale. Briggs’ close investigation of debt cases on five separate manors in the fourteenth century indicates that most debts were less than 5 s. and that, on some manors at least, very small debts which must chiefly have been intended to support consumption rather than investment predominated.³¹

Despite the evidence of large numbers of small debts, it is also strongly evident that a great deal of the capital which was contested in litigation was concentrated in a relatively small number of cases. As Briggs also notes, while even some of the relatively small debts involved quite large sums, if considered in terms of day-to-day expenditures, there were also other debt cases recorded in the manor court cases which involved really quite substantial sums.³² While the typical, but not always consistently applied, limit of 40 s. inevitably contained the extent of debts recorded in the manor court, even debts of 20 s. or more involved, by most contemporary standards, large sums of money.³³

While the number of debt cases involving large sums of money was certainly less than the number of cases in which smaller sums were pursued, it remains the case that, on more than one level, the debt cases in which large sums were contested, were very important. In a previous paper, it has been shown that a simple count of proportions of cases relative to the amount of the debt risks under-representing the significance of cases involving large debts.³⁴ The present author has looked at the range of available published data on debt litigation in English manorial courts and by, for instance, examining the proportion of cases identified by Briggs for the Cambridgeshire manors of Oakington, Dry Drayton and Cottenham in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries has shown that while the proportion of debts worth 5 s. or less on these manors was in excess of 70 per cent, the total value of debts worth 5 s. or less was, by estimation, less than 15 per cent. By contrast, debts to the individual value of 10 s. or more accounted for upwards of 70 per cent of the total value loaned on the three manors while their number accounted for just 17.3 per cent.³⁵ In the first instance, but a point that will be explored less in this paper than elsewhere, the recovery of the larger debts was important in terms of its significance for the extent of available capital operating within particular locales. At Hinderclay (Suffolk) in the second decade of the fourteenth century, for instance, just under 11.5 per cent of all debt cases accounted for a little over 45 per cent of the total capital in litigation in that decade, in other words there was a small number of very large (in terms of the size of debt) cases but that these were highly significant in terms of contested capital.³⁶ In what follows we can to explore in a little more detail cases involving relatively large sums of capital of this kind and consider the implications of such cases for the wider context of credit extension and debt litigation in the medieval village in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth century.

      As already discussed, individual litigants, estate officials and attorneys, could have significant influence upon the nature and process of litigation conducted in the manor court, especially during a period when the manorial court as a jurisdictional entity was evolving and at the same time as were common law courts. Just as in other periods, when lords were prepared to respond to external influence and to adjust their modes of dealing accordingly, so we can see lords in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth century allowing their courts to be moulded to suit the needs to litigants and, especially, wealthy and relatively powerful litigants capable of dealing in relatively large sums of money. We can test this proposition further here by consider the introduction of external forms of dealing at law into the manor court.

      Much that passed as litigation in the manor courts of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries responded to patterns and developments also evident in common law courts of the same period. So, for instance, the appearance and development of discrete forms of action, insistence on correct pleading, rules as to the use of particular proofs and so on, responded to and reflected, sometimes with a degree of local colour, conventions and forms also evident in the emergent case law in central common law courts. There remains much potential work to be done in exploring the chronology as well as the direction of flow in such relationships; the assumption is, and it is implicit in much that is written here, that legal development commenced in central courts and was subsequently adopted, sometimes in suitably modified form, in local and seignueurial courts; while this is most likely to have been the case, it is also possible to suggest movement in the opposite direction, an emerging process of law finding favour in local courts before transferring to more central courts. In the final part of this discussion, as an example of transmission of law into the manor court, we can consider the ways in which external plaintiffs and creditors often brought their own expectations of law and process into the manor court and, most especially, sought to apply merchant law, lex mercatoria, within the private jurisdiction of the seigneury.

What was lex mercatoria c. 1300? As is reasonably well known, merchant law was a growing corpus of laws and conventions a main thrust of which was to permit dealing between merchants to be conducted both with relative speed and a good degree of confidence. As James Davis writes, lex mercatoria was «important in defining sales, the procedures of debt litigation and the nature of contractual obligations».³⁷ One important feature of the developing merchant law in this period was the ambition to prevent debtor-defendants from slowing recovery and especially by using compurgation in order to deny their obligation. The principle behind this was clearly that plaintiff-creditors needed the facility to recover obligations efficiently, the beneficial consequence of which was that capital was returned with relative speed to them and thereby into commerce. In order, for instance, to avoid a lengthy process, a creditor seeking repayment under merchant law could use a recognised formula in his pleading in order to effect a speedy recovery. Thus, later thirteenth and early fourteenth-century custumals from Ipswich (Suffolk) and Norwich (Norfolk) state clearly the obligation upon defendant-debtors to dispense with a defence founded upon compurgation should the plaintiff claim that the original contract had been agreed in a market in the presence of witnesses.³⁸ These kinds of convention were on occasion carried into the manor court.

In certain instances, it is quite clear that the plaintiff is an external agent, familiar with merchant law and able to apply it in the manor court. So, for instance, at Walsham le Willows in 1321 the defendant was pursued in the manor court there on account of a contract established in 1319 at Ipswich through which the defendant was to render regular accounts relating to the money lent, and this was to be done according to merchant law and a written agreement between the СКАЧАТЬ