CRIME AND JUSTICE | |
Subject: | Presentments in the Norwich leet court |
Original source: | Norfolk Record Office, Norwich leet roll, 16 Edward I |
Transcription in: | William Hudson, ed. Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, Selden Society, V (1892), 4-6. |
Original language: | Latin |
Location: | Norwich |
Date: | 1288 |
TRANSLATION
Leet of Conesford, 8 February 1288
|
DISCUSSION
These extracts from the record of the leet session held at Lent give a sense of the range of offences and misdemeanours committed by townspeople or outsiders or strangers. The injured party might be an individual or the community in general. Sometimes the report was not of a specific crime, but simply of suspicious behaviour (e.g. Henry de Campesse). Some offences were be serious enough to require referring to a higher court, such as the eyre the accused were ordered arrested. Most were punishable by moderate fines, ranging to judge from a roll of amercements from 1288/89 from 12d. to 6s.8d. The lightest fines were for being out of tithing a very common offence raising hue and cry, or for jurors who failed to present offences; while the heaviest were for serious market offences such as being engaged in trade without being a freeman or forestalling. But there were not fixed fines for different offences; circumstances surrounding the particular offence, the number of offences, and the capability of the offender to pay were taken into consideration; thus for example one man not in tithing was fined 2s. because he had married while in that condition, while the bailiffs cancelled some fines because of the poverty of the offenders. The repeated blanket accusations against brewers, cooks, fishermen, etc., show however that the fines were not sufficient deterrent and were perhaps perceived simply as the price of doing (illicit) business. The record of the presentment of offences in each sub-leet, by a 12-man jury selected from the principal tithingmen (or "capital pledges") of each sub-leet, usually began with a list of those selected to take the juror's oath, followed by a list of the offences they reported. The offences identified prior to the listing of jurors seems in part associated with the process of selection: one juror was disqualified because himself an offender (which put him in a conflict of interest), while another initially refused to serve on the jury informing on friends or neighbours doubtless not being popular, while jurors were themselves subject to fines if an offence came to notice that they did not report but changed his mind when threatened with amercement. On the other hand, part of these initial presentments may have had to do with administration of the tithing system itself, since two of the three are concerned with men not affiliated with tithings. The few other examples of this that occur in the roll support this hypothesis up to a point. It appears that the presentments of the juries were accepted at face value, unless clear evidence to the contrary appeared. Jurymen were generally, if not from those leading families whose members bore the burden of the most responsible civic offices, then established traders and artisans who were property-holders and might be considered to have a stake in maintaining law and order within their community and to be relatively honest and credible members of that community; These capital pledges had presumably consulted with members of their tithing before bringing forward accusations at the view of frankpledge, and there is slight evidence that the jury as a whole needed to support accusations by any of its members. There is no evidence of witnesses being sought. While accused parties may have had the opportunity to defend themselves, it was not a given that they would be present at the session at all; the word of an individual against that of a group of twelve townsmen would not have counted for much. On the other hand, there are several cases where fines were cancelled because the bailiffs concluded that the accusation was without substance, and in one case a capital pledge was fined for false accusation against a woman concerning a crime committed within his sub-leet, after the bailiffs (apparently) cross-checked with the accused's tithing denied her involvement. |
NOTES
"Robert Scot and the husband of Emma le Hauteyn"
"Robert Gerveys"
"all brewers"
"fishermen and poulterers"
"encroachment"
"fuller's blocks"
"trephah"
"Court Christian"
"private settlement"
"tanners have a gild"
"market" |
Created: August 18, 2001. Last update: August 28, 2017 | © Stephen Alsford, 2001-2017 |