Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Disputes in late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul: some problems
- 2 ‘Placita’ and the settlement of disputes in later Merovingian Francia
- 3 Dispute settlement in Carolingian West Francia
- 4 People and places in dispute in ninth-century Brittany
- 5 Visigothic law and regional custom in disputes in early medieval Spain
- 6 Land disputes and their social framework in Lombard–Carolingian Italy, 700–900
- 7 Dispute settlement in the Byzantine provinces in the tenth century
- 8 Charters, law and the settlement of disputes in Anglo-Saxon England
- 9 Dispute settlement in medieval Ireland: a preliminary inquiry
- 10 An early modern postscript: the Sandlaw dispute, 1546
- Conclusion
- Appendix texts of the documents discussed
- Glossary
- List of works cited
- Index
8 - Charters, law and the settlement of disputes in Anglo-Saxon England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Disputes in late fifth- and sixth-century Gaul: some problems
- 2 ‘Placita’ and the settlement of disputes in later Merovingian Francia
- 3 Dispute settlement in Carolingian West Francia
- 4 People and places in dispute in ninth-century Brittany
- 5 Visigothic law and regional custom in disputes in early medieval Spain
- 6 Land disputes and their social framework in Lombard–Carolingian Italy, 700–900
- 7 Dispute settlement in the Byzantine provinces in the tenth century
- 8 Charters, law and the settlement of disputes in Anglo-Saxon England
- 9 Dispute settlement in medieval Ireland: a preliminary inquiry
- 10 An early modern postscript: the Sandlaw dispute, 1546
- Conclusion
- Appendix texts of the documents discussed
- Glossary
- List of works cited
- Index
Summary
The extant records of Anglo-Saxon dispute settlement and judicial procedure have received remarkably little attention from historians either of English law or of early English society. Just one attempt has been made to assemble and discuss a corpus of cases, exactly a hundred and ten years ago; these ‘select’ thirty-five include three post-dating 1066, two pairs relating to the same disputes and one that would be more properly labelled political melodrama (if, indeed, it ever happened at all); and the relevant residue constitutes less than twenty per cent of even the more informative records. This collection received the most cursory acknowledgement from Maitland in the classic history of early English law. It was more fully used, and to some extent expanded, by Liebermann in the relentlessly learned Sachglossar to his Gesetze der Angelsachsen, but its evidence was always subsidiary to that of the Gesetze themselves. The orthodoxy thus established over forty years has remained substantially entrenched throughout the subsequent seventy. In this article, I shall argue that full analysis of the whole range of specific and descriptive evidence, largely drawn from charters, compels radical reappraisal of the conclusions drawn from prescriptive law codes about Anglo-Saxon litigation. But more must first be said of what ‘orthodoxy’ is, and how it came to subsist.
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- The Settlement of Disputes in Early Medieval Europe , pp. 149 - 168Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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