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

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_d5fe4ae9-2f1b-5a8f-ad62-6d59183a97e2">³⁹ In three separate cases at Great Barton in 1316 the same plaintiff, Stephen de Haukedon pursued three different individuals for the recovery of large sums of grain, the first of which was proved by sealed tally; in only one of the three cases, the last and the most poorly preserved, did the defendant seek to defend himself, possibly again suggesting that de Haukedon was a wealthy external agent able to bring the force of merchant law into the manor court.⁴⁰ More explicitly, a defendant at Horsham St Faith (Norfolk) was distrained to answer a claim that he had bought iron at Norwich, the sum for which was to repaid at the local market (nundine) at Horsham; as the defendant had failed to pay the debt, the plaintiff sought recovery by offering to show his tally accordingly to law merchant. The defendant, faced with this proof, acknowledged the debt.⁴¹ Such instances suggest that, within the manor court, the force of merchant law was clearly recognised and that defences, notably compurgation, were recognised to be weak or inadmissible defences in certain compelling circumstances.

This kind of external influence upon the development of law and, over time, the kinds of tactical and procedural approaches developed in the manor court requires further investigation. While there is plentiful evidence that defendants remained committed to compurgation as an effective defence in most instances, they clearly needed to be wary of its limits especially when confronted by a combination of proof in the form of tally or other written instrument, as well as witness proof including attesting a prior contract entered into at a market or market town. Further research in this area might, for instance, consider the possibility that peasant litigants introduced such devices into their own pleading, not the least of which would be reference to contracts established within a market location. It is also worth noting that, in so far as can be gleaned to date from an examination of debt litigation recorded in court rolls from western and eastern England in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, references to merchant law are relatively common in the eastern England sample but far less evident in western England. It is likely that a combination of factors, including proximity to a number of significant commercial centres in which merchant law was, as we have seen in the above references to its codification at Norwich and Ipswich, frequently employed and a commercialised regional economy in which economic interaction between towns and their hinterlands were commonplace, help explain the greater tendency for merchant law to reach into manorial courts in eastern England. Such regional features of legal development add to our sense of a developing law in manorial courts which, while in many respects strikingly uniform, also displays nuance and subtle distinctions.⁴²

¹ Elaine Clark: «Debt Litigation in a Late Medieval English Vill», in James Ambrose Raftis (ed.): Pathways to Medieval Peasants, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981.

² See, for example, Chris Briggs, Credit and village society in fourteenth-century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009; idem: «Manor court procedures, debt litigation levels, and rural credit provision in England, c. 1290-c. 1380», Law and History Review, 24 (2006), pp. 519-558; Phillipp R. Schofield: «Dearth, debt and the local land market in a late thirteenth century Suffolk village», Agricultural History Review, 45, part 1, (1997), pp. 1-17; idem: «L’endettement et le crédit dans la campagne anglaise au moyen âge», in Maurice Berthe (ed.): Endettement paysan et crédit rural dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne. Actes des XVII^es journées internationales d’histoire de l’abbaye de Flaran, Septembre 1995, Toulouse, Mirail, 1998, pp. 69-97; idem: «Access to credit in the medieval English countryside», in Phillipp R. Schofield & Nicholas J. Mayhew (ed.): Credit and debt in medieval England, Oxford, Oxbow, 2002, pp. 106-126; idem: «Credit and debt in the medieval English countryside», in Il Mercato della Terra. Secc. XIII-XVIII, Prato, Monash University, 2004, pp. 785-796; idem: «The social economy of the medieval village», Economic History Review, 61 S1 (2008), pp. 38-63.

³ C. Briggs: Credit and village society.

⁴ C. Briggs: Credit and village society; Ph. R. Schofield: «Dearth, debt and the local land market»; Ph. R. Schofield: «Social economy».

⁵ Phillipp R. Schofield: «Dealing in crisis: external credit and the early fourteenth-century English village», in Martin Allen and Matthew Davies (eds): Medieval Merchants and Money: Essays in honour of James L. Bolton, London IHR, 2016, pp. 253-270.

⁶ For a discussion of the historiography of the medieval English peasantry, see Phillipp R. Schofield: Peasants and historians. Debating the medieval English peasantry, Manchester, MUP, 2016. See also Christopher Dyer: «Les Cours Manoriales», Études Rurales, 103-104 (1986), pp. 19-28 and on the appearance of manorial court rolls, Zvi Razi & Richard. M. Smith: «The Origins of the English Manorial Court Rolls as a Written Record: A Puzzle», in Z. Razi & R. M. Smith (ed.): Medieval Society and the Manor Court, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 36-68.

⁷ Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seigneurial Courts, ed. and tr. Frederic W. Maitland, Selden Society, 2, 1889.

⁸ In addition to the works listed above by Chris Briggs and Phillipp R. Schofield (n. 2), an important and earlier contribution was made by John S. Beckerman: «Customary law in English manorial courts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries», unpublished University of London PhD, 1972; the core of his thesis was subsequently published as idem, «Procedural innovation and institutional change in medieval English manorial courts», Law and History Review, 10 (1992), pp. 198-252. Other historians have touched on such issues as part of their wider campaign of research; see especially, Lloyd Bonfield: «The Nature of Customary Law in the Manor Courts of Medieval England», Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXXI (1989), pp. 515-534; idem: «What did Edwardian Villagers Mean by «Customary Law»?», in Z. Razi & R. M. Smith (ed.): Medieval Society and the Manor Court, pp. 103-116; John S. Beckerman: «Toward a Theory of Medieval Manorial Adjudication: the Nature of Communal Judgements in a System of Customary Law», Law and History Review, xiii (1995), pp. 1-22; Paul R. Hyams: «What did Edwardian Villagers Understand by Law?», in Z. Razi & R. M. Smith (ed.): Medieval Society and the Manor Court, pp. 69-102. Hyam’s important essay and the themes arising have recently been discussed in Chris Briggs & Phillipp R. Schofield: «Understanding Edwardian villagers’ use of law: some manor court litigation evidence», Reading Medieval Studies, XL (2014) (guest ed. D. Postles), pp. 117-139.

⁹ C. Briggs: Credit and village society; also Ph. R. Schofield: «Dearth, debt and the local land market»; idem: «Credit, crisis and the money supply, c. 1280-c. 1330», in Martin Allen & D’Maris Coffman: Money, Prices and Wages. Essays in Honour of Professor Nicholas Mayhew, Basingstoke / New York, Palgrave, 2015, pp. 94-108.

¹⁰ On which, see, for instance,

¹¹ Phillipp R. Schofield: «Credit and its record in the later medieval English countryside», in Philipp R. Rössner (ed.): Cities – Coins – Commerce. Essays presented to Ian Blanchard СКАЧАТЬ