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A custumal is a medieval-English document that stipulates the economic, political, and social customs of a manor or town. [1] It is common for it to include an inventory of customs, regular agricultural, trading and financial activities as well as local laws. It could be written for one manor or a whole county.
The National Archives define custumal as "an early type of survey which consists of a list of the manor's tenants with the customs under which each held his house and lands." [1] Custumals were compiled in Latin, Anglo-French or Law French and sometimes mixed fragments in different languages. [2] [3] They were commonly preceded with a standard formula in French: Ces sount les usages, et les custumes le ques ... (These are the usages and customs of ...). [4]
Custumals existed in two distinct forms: [5]
Territories governed by a custumal ranged from a single manor (Custumal of the Manor of Cockerham , 1326–1327 [5] ) to an assortment of manors under common control (Custumal of Battle Abbey , reign of Edward I [6] ) to a whole county. The county-wide Custumal of Kent , written in Anglo-French, [7] codified the unique system of gavelkind in Kent that existed for centuries before its enactment in 1293. The Custumal of Kent has been regularly copied by scribes, who introduced errors and inserted glosses, [8] and printed by Richard Tottel in 1536 and by William Lambarde in 1576. These printed codes are all distinctly different, [9] the three handwritten and two printed copies analyzed by Hull have only nine substantially matching paragraphs (out of thirty-five). [10] Lesser custumals were far more stable: the Custumal of the Manor of Cockerham was properly revised in 1463. [11]
Custumals of large ecclesiastical estates introduced their own systems of grading the tenants. The Custumal of Battle Abbey used four grades:
Custumals provide historians an insight into all significant aspects of everyday life in a manorial estate. [5] Custumals of the Manor of Cockerham, written in Latin in 1326–1327, regulated usage of all resources of the country: peat fuel, salt, sheep, goats, horses, cattle and shoreline mussels. [13] It imposed practical safeguards for preservation of the property: the tenants were obliged to "maintain the dikes of the mill pond so that the pond does not burst for the lack of them". [11] It also set the rules of personal conduct: "no tenant shall call any of his neighbours a thief or a robber under a penalty of 40d. And no tenant shall call any of his neighbours a whore, for a penalty of 12d." [11] Ultimately, according to Steven Justice, "no form of writing served lordly interests and ideology more surely and directly than the manorial custumal." [14]
Since public business in the Middle Ages was judicial in character, the custumal and the court roll were the principal registers of a medieval borough’s administration. Custumals, or collections of customary law, for the English boroughs began to be compiled as early as the late twelfth century, the earliest of which have survived for the boroughs of Ipswich [15] and Exeter. [16] Custumals were compiled for a practical purpose: to guide, and even educate, successive generations of civic officials tasked with keeping law and order within their boroughs. Even though town clerks and scribes inherited these registers as part of their duties to preserve local custom, they were also obligated to modify and add to them to respond to changing interests and the needs of their communities. As such, it is not out of the ordinary to have custumals survive only in copies or recensions of the original.
The study of borough customs primarily flourished in the early twentieth century, when both historians and amateur antiquarians began to take a keen interest in the constitutional origins of the English law. Indeed, the most comprehensive work on borough law is Mary Bateson's Borough Customs, published for the Selden Society in two volumes for the years 1904 and 1906. [17]
Although the clauses and ordinances found in borough custumals seem to be primarily concerned with the rights of burgesses (the men who had entered the town's freedom) and regulation of economic practices, they also reveal larger social concerns regarding the governance of the borough. A good example of these political, social, and economic concerns, and how they could change over time, can be easily seen in the document outlining the customs of the borough of Maldon, in Essex. [18]
Manorialism, also known as seigneurialism, the manor system or manorial system, was the method of land ownership in parts of Europe, notably France and later England, during the Middle Ages. Its defining features included a large, sometimes fortified manor house in which the lord of the manor and his dependants lived and administered a rural estate, and a population of labourers who worked the surrounding land to support themselves and the lord. These labourers fulfilled their obligations with labour time or in-kind produce at first, and later by cash payment as commercial activity increased. Manorialism was part of the feudal system.
Domesday Book is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 at the behest of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manuscript was originally known by the Latin name Liber de Wintonia, meaning "Book of Winchester", where it was originally kept in the royal treasury. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states that in 1085 the king sent his agents to survey every shire in England, to list his holdings and dues owed to him.
Copyhold was a form of customary land ownership common from the Late Middle Ages into modern times in England. The name for this type of land tenure is derived from the act of giving a copy of the relevant title deed that is recorded in the manorial court roll to the tenant; not the actual land deed itself. The legal owner of the manor land remained the mesne lord, who was legally the copyholder, according to the titles and customs written down in the manorial roll. In return for being given land, a copyhold tenant was required to carry out specific manorial duties or services. The specific rights and duties of copyhold tenants varied greatly from one manor to another and many were established by custom. By the 19th century, many customary duties had been replaced with the payment of rent.
Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery. It developed during the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.
The open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in much of Europe during the Middle Ages and lasted into the 20th century in Russia, Iran, and Turkey. Each manor or village had two or three large fields, usually several hundred acres each, which were divided into many narrow strips of land. The strips or selions were cultivated by peasants, often called tenants or serfs. The holdings of a manor also included woodland and pasture areas for common usage and fields belonging to the lord of the manor and the religious authorities, usually Roman Catholics in medieval Western Europe. The farmers customarily lived in separate houses in a nucleated village with a much larger manor house and church nearby. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among the residents of the manor.
Ranulf de Glanvill was Chief Justiciar of England during the reign of King Henry II (1154–89) and was the probable author of Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie, the earliest treatise on the laws of England.
Lord of the manor is a title that, in Anglo-Saxon England and Norman England, referred to the landholder of a rural estate. The titles date to the English feudal system. The lord enjoyed manorial rights as well as seignory, the right to grant or draw benefit from the estate. The title continues in modern England and Wales as a legally recognised form of property that can be held independently of its historical rights. It may belong entirely to one person or be a moiety shared with other people.
Gavelkind was a system of land tenure chiefly associated with the Celtic law in Ireland and Wales and with the legal traditions of the English county of Kent.
Frankpledge was a system of joint suretyship common in England throughout the Early Middle Ages and High Middle Ages. The essential characteristic was the compulsory sharing of responsibility among persons connected in tithings. This unit, under a leader known as the chief-pledge or tithing-man, was then responsible for producing any man of that tithing suspected of a crime. If the man did not appear, the entire group could be fined.
Anglo-Saxon law is a body of written rules and customs that were in place during the Anglo-Saxon period in England, before the Norman conquest. This body of law, along with early Medieval Scandinavian law and Germanic law, descended from a family of ancient Germanic custom and legal thought. However, Anglo-Saxon law codes are distinct from other early Germanic legal statements—known as the leges barbarorum, in part because they were written in Old English instead of in Latin. The laws of the Anglo-Saxons were the second in medieval Western Europe after those of the Irish to be expressed in a language other than Latin.
Kent is a traditional county in South East England with long-established human occupation.
William Lambarde was an English antiquarian, writer on legal subjects, and politician. He is particularly remembered as the author of A Perambulation of Kent (1576), the first English county history; Eirenarcha (1581), a widely read manual on the office and role of justice of the peace; and Archeion, a discourse that sought to trace the Anglo-Saxon roots of English common law, prerogative and government.
Cockerham is a small village and civil parish within the City of Lancaster district in Lancashire, England. It is 6 miles (9.7 km) south of Lancaster and 15 miles (24 km) north-northwest of Preston. Lying on the River Cocker, at the estuary of the River Lune, the parish had a population of 671 at the 2011 Census.
LaurenceNowell was an English antiquarian, cartographer and pioneering scholar of the Old English language and literature.
Halesowen Abbey was a Premonstratensian abbey in Halesowen, England of which only ruins remain. Founded by Peter des Roches with a grant of land from King John, the abbey's official year of inauguration was 1218. It acquired two daughter abbeys and a dependent priory. It also acquired a considerable range of estates, mostly concentrated within the region, and a number of churches, which it appropriated after being granted the advowsons. The abbey's manorial court records have survived in large part, portraying a discontented community, driven to many acts of resistance and at one point to challenge the abbey's very existence. The abbey played no great part in the affairs of its order, although it was represented at all levels. At least one abbot attracted serious criticism from within the order, which attempted to remove him. Its canons observed the Rule of St Augustine to a varying degree, with some serious lapses, at least in the late 15th century, when the order's visitor uncovered widespread sexual exploitation of local women. The abbey was moderately prosperous and survived the suppression of the lesser monasteries. It was dissolved in 1538.
The Sachsenspiegel is one of the most important law books and custumals compiled during the Holy Roman Empire. Originating between 1220 and 1235 as a record of existing local traditional customary laws and rulings, it was used in places until as late as 1900. Some legal principles as captured in the book reign into recent time laws throughout Europe. It is important not only for its lasting effect on later German and Dutch law but also as an early example of written prose in a German language. The Sachsenspiegel is the first comprehensive law book not in Latin, but in Middle Low German. A Latin edition is known to have existed, but only fragmented chapters remain.
The manorial courts were the lowest courts of law in England during the feudal period. They had a civil jurisdiction limited both in subject matter and geography. They dealt with matters over which the lord of the manor had jurisdiction, primarily torts, local contracts and land tenure, and their powers only extended to those who lived within the lands of the manor: the demesne and such lands as the lord had enfeoffed to others, and to those who held land therein. Historians have divided manorial courts into those that were primarily seignorial – based on feudal responsibilities – and those based on separate delegation of authority from the monarch. There were three types of manorial court: the court of the honour; the court baron; and the court customary, also known as the halmote court.
Feudalism as practiced in the Kingdoms of England during the medieval period was a state of human society that organized political and military leadership and force around a stratified formal structure based on land tenure. As a military defence and socio-economic paradigm designed to direct the wealth of the land to the king while it levied military troops to his causes, feudal society was ordered around relationships derived from the holding of land. Such landholdings are termed fiefdoms, traders, fiefs, or fees.
Guildable Manor is a Court Leet in Southwark under the authority of the City of London, along with the King's Manor, Southwark, and the Great Liberty. The name of 'Guildable' first recorded in 1377 refers to the collection of taxes there and was adopted to distinguish this from the other manors of the Southwark area. Its legal title, according to a Royal charter granted to the City by King Edward III in 1327, is 'the ville of Southwark' i.e. 'ville = 'town'; in the more substantive charter of Edward VI it is designated 'The Town and Borough of Southwark' as is stated on its Seal. It is a preserved limited jurisdiction under the Administration of Justice Act 1977. Although neither a guild nor a livery company, the Guildable Manor does have a permanent organization, consisting of Officers and Jurors.
In the early fourteenth century, tensions between villagers from Darnhall and Over, Cheshire, and their feudal lord, the Abbot of Vale Royal Abbey, erupted into violence over whether they had villein—that is, servile—status. The villagers argued not, while the Abbey believed it was due the villagers' feudal service.
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