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Law Archive
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Theft, Homicide and Crime in Late Anglo-Saxon Law
Posted on May 27, 2013 | No CommentsIn order to understand these issues properly we must first consider our own ideas about ‘crime’, a deeply problematic term for the period before the late twelfth century -
Danish Penal Law in the Middle Ages: Cases of Homicide and Woundings
Posted on May 25, 2013 | No CommentsIn the provincial laws, a killing was not simply a killing. The penalty imposed on the killer depended on the conditions under which the killing had taken place. -
Reconstruction of a Judicial Duel c. 1400
Posted on May 25, 2013 | No CommentsWatch this demonstration of a judicial duel at the turn of the 15th century, presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2013 -
Reading between the lines: Old Germanic and early Christian views on abortion
Posted on May 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe object of my studies was to determine whether women in the early medieval Germanic West (could have) committed abortion, when confronted with an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy. -
Student Violence at the University of Oxford
Posted on May 9, 2013 | No CommentsMy first foray of KZOO 2013 couldn't have been off to a better start with, “I just don’t want to die without a few scars”: Medieval Fight Clubs, Masculine Identity, and Public (Dis)order. There were only two papers in this session and both were riveting. I felt like I couldn't type fast enough to get it all in! The first paper was given by Professor Andrew Larsen of Marquette University. Professor Larsen published a book on high and late medieval student violence and the Saint Scholastica's Day Riot at Oxford university. -
Identifying Women Proprietors in Wills from Fifteenth-Century London
Posted on April 21, 2013 | No CommentsMost Londoners lodged their post obit requests with the Husting Court, the county court of London. The testators were primarily wealthy artisans and merchants, since one needed to possess a substantial amount of property in order to register the details of the division of that property. -
The Interrogation of of a Male Transvestite Prostitute in Fourteenth Century London
Posted on April 11, 2013 | No CommentsDespite the general rule that sexual offenses were matters for the church courts, in some cases the city of London took charge of these offenses. Prostitution and procuring, for example, involved public order; the temporal courts dealt with them for that reason, so that the same people might be prosecuted in both jusrisdictions for the same offense. -
New Towns in Medieval France and Nature of Institutions
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsIn its early stages, a new town was a village community created by a central authority (king or overlord) on his wildland to meet the needs of growing populations and to further both its own benefits and the common interests of the inhabitants. -
Intermarriage in fifteenth-century Ireland: the English and Irish in the ‘four obedient shires’
Posted on March 31, 2013 | No CommentsThe so-called ‘four obedient shires’ of Meath, Kildare, Louth and Dublin are a fruitful area for a study of marriage between the English of Ireland and the Irish, as these counties comprised the region of the colony most firmly under English control in the fifteenth century. Much of the anti-Irish rhetoric that survives in sources from the period... -
Lawyers in the Old Icelandic Family Sagas: Heroes, Villains, and Authors
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsAlong with the accomplishments of skill in arms and verse-making, many a saga hero is credited with a knowledge of law and legal procedure. Many of these heroes are shown duelling with their enemiesin a series of legal disputes forming a series of chapters. -
Licit and Illicit Sexuality in Medieval Iberia: A Survey of Las Siete Partidas
Posted on March 22, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis examines Las Siete Partidas, a thirteenth-century Castilian legal code of laws, including on marriage and illicit sexual behaviors. -
Hunting and Hunters in Medieval Aragonese Legislation
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsOur research on hunting in the kingdom of Aragón in the 12th-15th centuries is based on the information provided by two groups of legal texts: those for local or regional areas and those that were applied to all the kingdom after the 13th century. -
Gilbert Foliot and the two swords : law and political theory in twelfth-century England
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsConsidering the importance of the Church as a driving force in twelfth- century political history, the complex relationship between piety and Church involvement in lay politics during this time period remains surprisingly under-explored. -
Detecting gestures in medieval images
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsWe present a template-based detector for gestures visualized in legal manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Depicted persons possess gestures with specific semantic meaning from the perspective of legal history. -
Functions of the Cantred in Medieval Ireland
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe cantred as territorial division was recognised everywhere in Ireland by the Anglo-Norman colonists in the first decades of the establishment of the colony. The subsequent use made of these units depended on a number of variables. -
Widows in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsOwing to a fairly large number of mainly vernacular codes of law that have survived, we are in a position to see at least how in legislation the position of women in general, but also of widows in particular, was defined. -
Animals on Trial
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe history of animals in the legal system sketched by Evans is rich and resonant; it provokes profound questions about the evolution of jurisprudential procedure, social and religious organization and notions of culpability and punishment, and funda-mental philosophical questions regarding the place of man within the natural order. -
The Church and sexuality in medieval Iceland
Posted on February 13, 2013 | No CommentsFrom its earliest days Christianity has attempted to control human sexuality. The letters of Paul and the writings of the Church Fathers praise the state of virginity above that of marriage, and within matrimony permit sex only for procreation. -
Sir John Fortescue and the French Polemical Treatises of the Hundred Years War
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsInevitably Fortescue had to adopt new arguments for the defence of Henry VI. To this end he asserted that the Lancastrians now had a just title through divine and ecclesiastical approbation, popular consent and prescription, but the core of his case was a direct response to the Yorkist claim that they had a superior hereditary title to the throne. -
Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsThe copying of books was also slow, tedious, and very time-consuming; it took years for a scribe to complete 'a particularly fine manuscript with colored initials and miniature art work.' -
“Full Faith and Credit” in Merrie Olde England: New Insights for Marriage Conflicts Law from the Thirteenth Century
Posted on January 31, 2013 | No CommentsHere the subject is full faith and credit and the implications which the exposure of the myth of universality might carry for the recognition of judgments concerning marriage. As with the choice of law problem, so with the recognition of judgments, there is discovered in the anti- quities of English law a perception and comprehension exceeding our own. -
Human Drama, Animal Trials: What the Medieval Animal Trials can Teach Us About Justice for Animals
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsThere is a long history, mainly from the medieval and early modern periods, of animals being tried for offenses such as attacking human beings and eating crops. -
The Scandinavian element beyond the Danelaw
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe present paper concentrates on the Scandinavian element present in Eng- lish in the area beyond the Danelaw, i.e. in the West Midlands and Southern parts of the country. -
England: One Country, Two Courts
Posted on December 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe tension created by the two-court system is an integral part of England’s administrative and constitutional history. Exactly how integral has generated a considerable amount of scholarly work, from explanations of the sources of the conflict, to how the disagreement over jurisdiction was addressed throughout the Middle Ages, to what impact the issue had in shaping England’s overall political development. -
Suicide in the Middle Ages
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsAll three types of source need careful interpretation. Suicide is notoriously elusive to records even in modern times, and more so for the Middle Ages. Once due allowances have been made for each genre, however, it is some reassurance that they agree on certain basics, and that these, in turn, agree with estimates from better-recorded centuries...