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Neighbors, Courts, and Kings: Reflections on Michael Macnair's Vicini

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Patrick Wormald
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Extract

Mike Macnair's deeply learned and profoundly subtle article establishes to the more or less total satisfaction of this respondent that the origins of “jury” procedure lie in testimonial rather than adjudicatory action: in witnessing by knowledgeable neighbors as opposed to “judgment-finding” by local experts. But then he is in my case—and perhaps to a greater extent than he himself realizes—preaching to the converted.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 17 , Issue 3 , Fall 1999 , pp. 597 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1999

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References

1. Macnair, Mike, “Vicinage and the Antecedents of the Jury,” Law and History Review 17 (1999): 537–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Davies, Wendy and Fouracre, Paul, eds., The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Lewis, Christopher P., “The Domesday Jurors,” Haskins Society Journal 5 (1993): 17–44.Google Scholar

4. Blake, Edwin O., ed., Liber Eliensis (Camden Society, 3d ser., vol. 92, Royal Historical Society, London, 1962) ii 4–49b, pp. 75–117Google Scholar; the “Libellus Æthelwoldi” itself will shortly be edited and translated by Alan Kennedy and Simon Keynes under the title Anglo-Saxon Ely.

5. Lib. Æth. 6 = Lib. El. ii 8, p. 81.

6. Lib. Æth. 12 = Lib. El. ii 11, p. 86.

7. Lib. Æth. 10 = Lib. El. ii 11, p. 84.

8. Lib. Æth. 8 = Lib. El. ii 10, p. 83; Lib. Æth. 46 = Lib. El. ii 35, p. 110.

9. Lib. Æth. 22 = Lib. El. ii 16, pp. 92–93.

10. Lib. Æth. 34 = Lib. El. ii 24, pp. 97–98.

11. Lib. Æth. 13 = Lib. El. ii 11, p. 88.

12. Whitelock, Dorothy, ed., Anglo-Saxon Wills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930)Google Scholar, no. xiii.

13. I Edward 1—1:4; IIÆthelstan 10, 12, 13:1; I Æthelred 3.

14. IV Edgar 3—6:2

15. III Æthelred 3:1–2 (recte 1997, cf. Macnair, 542).

16. van Caenegem, Raoul C., English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I (Selden Society, vols. 106–7, 1990–1991), no. 331, p. 290.Google Scholar

17. See my comment, “Frederic William Maitland and the Earliest English Law,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 12 and n. 43.

18. III Edgar 7, I Æthelred 1:1, III Æthelred 3:2, 4, II Cnut 22, 25, etc.; cf. already III Edmund 7:l, “omnes infamati et accusationibus ingravati.”

19. II Cnut 30.

20. II Cnut 25, III Edgar 7, with II Æthelstan 20—20:6: be it noted, as regards the argument above, that the duties later appertaining to the hundred are, for Æthelstan, those of “pa yldestan men that belong to the burh.”

21. E.g., I Æthelred 1:1–4, 4 [taken up by II Cnut 30—30:3, 33], III 3:4—4:2.