The previous chapter has set out how lords could come into positions of control and influence over hundreds, and how these kinds of interests could be turned into claims. That story is an important one for how jurisdiction developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but it is not the only one. Lords also came to preside over large numbers of courts which had more restricted scope and jurisdiction. These ultimately came to be predecessors of the omnipresent lordship and manorial courts of later medieval England, and of others such as courts leet. These early lordship courts are not well attested in the sources, and theories about their origins often have the quality of a conjecture. Much the most cited theory is that of Frederic Maitland, who suggested that these lesser courts began with their lords and the lands they allowed to their dependents, and so had a distinct point of origin from the hundred and shire; the two kinds of court had separate moments of genesis. Their later history was driven by the need to refine divisions of jurisdiction between lords’ courts and the others. From this starting place with lords, courts proliferated under the influence of kings and their agents, who defined franchise over time and so drove lords to reflect those definitions in the structures of their courts.

This chapter will offer a slightly different model. It will suggest that lords’ courts originated because lords broke parts off from the functions of hundreds. The evidence for this will be set out below, but largely it depends on two kinds of behaviour that can be seen in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. First, there was a trend towards the use of units beneath and within the hundreds. The eleventh-century hundred is an an obscure entity whose history has not yet been written, especially when compared to the vision of the tenth-century hundred that can be reconstructed from the laws. What indications there are suggest that in many parts of England after 1000 the hundred was run in ways not anticipated in the tenth century. In the eleventh century, many hundreds had been divided into lesser units that seem to have been the basis for the functions of the hundred in taxation and other matters.

Chapters 1–4 have set out a model for how change happened in the eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries. According to this, lords took business away from the communal courts of shire and especially of hundred. They did so either by taking control of hundred courts by various means, or by creating courts that were purely for their own dependents, and which did not match existing hundreds. The latter were mostly created through subtracting business from the hundred courts, which meant a rearrangement of power relationships between lords and their dependents. If someone’s tenure of land was witnessed through a lord’s court, then that tenure relied on the link to the lord. The creation of new courts had many consequences for the process of manorialisation, but had others for the hundreds themselves. Business had been taken away to other fora; attendees at the hundred no longer made their way there as often as they once had. If these processes had been pushed further, it was possible that shire and hundred might have petered out in England as fully as the mallus had in France. If so, this would have had substantial consequences for royal authority, for the hundred was a principal vehicle for the implementation and recognition of royal commands and authority. Without the hundred, kings would have had to work through the lords who controlled their courts to gain access to their dependents, or make claims over them. The point of lords’ courts, after all, was to prevent others gaining access to them.

Yet this did not happen. Hundreds survived, and continued to meet and operate. That they did so depended on some decisions made early in Henry I’s reign, and on some ideas which allowed for the diversifying landscape of courts to be organised in the king’s interest. First, kings asserted that the hundreds belonged to them. It is probable that earlier kings had regarded hundreds as in some sense theirs, for hundreds carried out their commands; but they did not state this explicitly, and hundreds had not been run by any royal reeve or representative. The royal claim over the hundreds subverted their communal nature, and turned them into a lordship court, in which they were run in the interests of the kings as lords.

This chapter has what is in principle a simple aim: to describe and to review the historiography of recent decades on how lordship was structured in later Anglo-Saxon England, and how this differed from the assumptions and practices about lordship from later eras, especially the twelfth century. The structure and practice of lordship in Anglo-Saxon England are of great importance for understanding how law was carried out and how courts were structured, because lordship was exercised through or in relation to courts, and the claims of lords and their dependents were defined there. Lordship, law and courts acted in concert, where the forms of each had an effect upon the others. Later Anglo-Saxon lordship was complicated, and came in different varieties, in which lordships over any one individual might be owed to different lords. The distinctive quality of later Anglo-Saxon lordship has long been described in the historiography, and that understanding has been expanded in some important and influential studies. Much of that historiography has been based upon the data presented in Domesday Book, and so covers the decades around that work in greatest detail. There have, however, been convincing recent studies that have argued that the tenth and eleventh centuries comprised a period in which the relationships between kings and lords, between royal authority and local power structures, changed markedly, and in which new terms and concepts appeared to describe those relationships. Lordship is thus not a simple matter to describe, for it was a fluid, developing web of relationships. The presentation of thinking of lordship here works backwards. It starts with the reasonably clear pattern that can be detected in Domesday Book, where three distinct kinds of lordship can be discerned. It then moves on to the evidence for lordship that can be seen in the laws, which describe arrangements before those in Domesday Book, and before the posited changes in the relationship between kings and lords of the earlier eleventh century. The laws were not specifically written about lordship, but contain numerous observations, instructions and implications that bear upon it. They contain many points that match the arrangements in Domesday Book, but there are many matters in that later source that are not present in most of the laws, such as soke.

The evidence for justices is scattered and diffuse, at least before the survival of consistent and relevant evidence from the last years of the twelfth century onward. It has never been brought together as rigorously as the evidence for sheriffs, and this has meant that justices as a whole have been understood much less thoroughly than sheriffs. There have been four modern exercises in listing justices for the period in question, but all are incomplete. The first was by Doris Stenton, and this was part of a larger exercise in tracing justices into the early thirteenth century. She based its contents on the kinds of sources which were of most importance for the thirteenth century, but carried those choices back into the early twelfth century. So, she discussed Anglo-Norman justices solely on the basis of the Pipe Roll for 1129–30, which meant that she could only cover a small part of the first half of the twelfth century, passed by other and more abundant kinds of evidence, and glossed over the simple ambiguity of so many entries in that Pipe Roll. A similar approach was followed in the list of justices by Warren Hollister. This again is based on the Pipe Roll for 1129–30, but Hollister supplemented the data because there are obvious gaps and missing segments in that Pipe Roll; for instance, he noted that there is no account for Shropshire there, and suggested that Payn fitz John might have acted as justice in that shire. His supplementary conjectures are plausible, and some are corroborated below, but he does not explain the basis for them. He seems to assume that only those known at the king’s court could have been justices. The third and fourth lists by Susan Reynolds, and by Christopher Brooke and Gillian Keir, covered the justices of London alone. They make use of a fuller range of sources, and draw extensively on royal and other charters to make these lists. They are the most successful list of justices hitherto published, though they are necessarily limited in geographical scope.

The lists below respond to the advantages and shortcomings of the previous lists, and to some of the ideas about justices set out in Chapter 7 above. In terms of sources, two of the lists are based overwhelmingly on charters, especially royal charters, and sideline the evidence of the Pipe Roll.

The previous chapter set out how the distinction between curia and placitum appeared, and how it was important for the definition of what lords and others claimed. From the early twelfth century the distinction was fundamental to how claims in kinds of legal business were described. Among the most significant applications of these categories was their use in relation to the idea of the pleas of the crown. This was one of the key claims used by kings to project their authority out into the shires, and it has been prominent in the historiography. It has tended to be understood in terms of how royal claims developed over time and the strength of kingship, from the statements about the king’s interests in 2 Cnut to the more comprehensive coverage in the Assize of Clarendon and even in Glanvill. There has been much debate over what the changing lists of royal interests meant, and what those changes indicate about the developing strength and authority of kings. The list of royal interests went through distinct phases in how it was described and categorised, and it is likely that these changes indicate something about how these interests were managed over time. In the law 2 Cnut 12, there is a list of the king’s interests which described them quite vaguely as rights or gerihta (or as iura in the Quadripartitus translation); it is only in the continuation of this passage in 2 Cnut 15 that a wite or financial penalty is noted, which indicates that the king could draw some financial benefit from these matters. By the later eleventh century, the interest of the king in some of these matters could be described as a forisfactura or forfeiture, which again draws attention to the financial aspect of the king’s involvement in these matters. Much of the historiography on crown pleas and their antecedents has focussed on the content of the claims that kings would raise, and has taken the number of themes that kings called their own as an index of the strength of kingship. This approach regards rights, forfeitures and pleas as essentially synonyms.

In one sense, lordship was straightforward; it was a reciprocal relationship between two individuals, where there was a substantial power differential, but where both sides could potentially benefit from the output, protection or cultural capital of the other. Yet lordship was also something rather more than this, in that it was also a matter of aspiration. For lords, lordship was a means for exercising dominance over others, and for creating a miniature society in which they might control those around them and under them. It was a model of interpersonal relationships as much as a legal and economic pattern.

A lot is knowable about how members of the elite conducted themselves in disputes and in court from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, especially in matters linked with land. The implications of cases between powerful and wealthy individuals could be very great, but they were by no means the norm. Those involved in cases over land, whether thegns or barons or knights, were free in law and so could act in accordance with individual or family interests; they were also guided by the expectations that attached to their class, which meant that they acted assertively and in accordance with notions of honour and so forth. Their strategies can therefore look quite modern at times, in that members of this class might act in ways that look individualistic. These kinds of cases and disputes dominate the surviving sources because of their implications and consequences, but they can only have formed a very small part of the total number of disputes that arose in England in the central middle ages.

In some settings, lordship was a powerful ideology that did much to form the conduct of those who were part of lordship relationships. In the poem on the Battle of Maldon, some of Byrhtnoth’s men willingly followed their lord to their deaths, and some tried to avenge him. For such as these, lordship formed a framework that made their lives and deaths meaningful. For these, it could be something that was emotionally satisfying and which made their lives and actions, and ultimately their deaths, intelligible.

In 1000, business was transacted overwhelmingly through the hundred court, and to some extent the shire court, which required the attendance of many people from across the districts they covered, and which were neutral ground in which the complicated patterns of later Anglo-Saxon multiple lordship could be defined and managed. There are some indications that hundreds might try to protect their territories from interventions from other hundreds, but otherwise there is little evidence for jurisdictional debate, that is, discussions that assumed that it was of great importance where a dispute was heard, or where participants assumed that someone could hear a case. It is hard to see how cases were allocated to one assembly or to another. Bocland was associated with kings, but they did not claim to hear cases arising about bocland exclusively, so that some were heard before kings but others in shires; there is no clear principle behind the choices made. More than one king stated that none should approach the king for justice unless he had been denied it in the hundred. There are clearly cases heard by kings before 1066, but those seem to have been few. The laws indicate that the hundred was the primary venue for hearing disputes, but the relationships between the various assemblies are far from clear.

Long before 1200, the role of the hundred had been considerably diminished. Lords formed units and courts below or within the hundred, which were termed halimota, and which meant that much business could now be transacted within the bounds of one lordship. This reduced the scope for others to interfere with the interests of the lords who held these halimota, and also allowed the holder of these courts to monopolise, or at least take much of, the dues and proceeds that arose from the meeting of the court. These changes were in the interests of lords, and were more or less driven by them; the preceding chapter set out evidence for how lords created these courts themselves. Perhaps the creation of these smaller units was in the interests of others too – those attending the court had shorter distances to travel – but the principal role in making these units lay with the lords behind their creation.

Shires and hundreds were created across England during the tenth century, and their operations were recorded in detail in the Anglo-Saxon laws, which have done so much to form ideas about how the new kingdom of England worked. Hundreds in particular had an important role as local assemblies, in which people would gather to see justice done to one another, and in which local communities, with all their dysfunctions and intimacies, sat in judgement upon themselves. The model set out in the laws was not long-lived, however. By the middle of the eleventh century it seems that already the unitary model of the hundred was starting to break down, and decay accelerated and became general into the twelfth century. The pattern of hundreds was remodelled as lords seized control of parts of it; either they claimed whole hundreds themselves, or they created lesser units which were originally subsets of hundreds and which were accountable to them, which came to be known as the halimota. The hundred managed by a lord and the halimota were mechanisms which allowed lords to raise exclusive claims over their dependents, and to monopolise lordship.

The halimota represented not just a change in how courts worked, but was also a step, and probably an important step, in the process of manorialisation, in which lordship, society and economy were progressively reconfigured. Later Anglo-Saxon lordship was multiple and many-sided; it was possible for one individual to owe different things to many different lords, because they might exercise lordship in different forms, or might exercise lordship in relation to different pieces of land, among other possible variations. In negotiating relationships with multiple lords, many peasants had a measure of agency, and their relationship to any one lord meant that it would have been harder for another to assert exclusive claims of lordship, because such a claim would have implications not merely for the peasant, but also for the other lords. Such complex lordship only worked because peasants were visible to many lords in public arenas such as the hundreds. Yet, it seems to have been a widespread aspiration among lords that they should be able to monopolise claims over those who were beneath them. This meant that they would have had exclusive claims over their resources and labour, and would have needed to prevent other lords making demands over their dependents.

The preceding chapters have sketched some of the background to the appearance of private courts. They have suggested that private courts did not exist in Anglo-Saxon England, because there is no concrete evidence for them, and because private courts were not compatible with the forms of lordship that can be seen in England before 1066. So far as can be seen, relationships between lords and dependents were managed in the public assemblies of hundred and shire, though the evidence for this is not uniform; the hundreds included greater lords and lesser lords, and even free peasants, but it is less clear how far they managed the links between lords and the unfree. The laws show, however, that the hundred in the tenth century could claim some powers even over slaves where they were accused of disruption of public order. There are important indicators of change, especially during the earlier eleventh century. The rise of the concept of soke helped to label and formalise some of the claims that lords could exact from their dependents, but also came to be used as a tool against other claims, and as a means for exempting the dependents of a lord from the attentions of the newly created sheriffs. Soke forms a parallel to the way in which lords sometimes used the formation of new churches as a means for hiding their dependents from many of the claims that might be made by minster churches. The drive towards monopolisation was the aspiration that drove the appearance of private courts.

This chapter aims to show how lords were able to take control of hundreds and subordinate them to their own interests. This is one model of change, but not the only one; the following chapter sketches another. Lords’ seizure of control over hundreds appears first in this book because it seems to have been the earliest to be put into effect. Other methods, in which lords detached parts of hundreds or created their own courts, accounted for most of the courts that lords controlled by 1150 or so. The appearance of these numerous courts depended on the development of an idea that courts were entities that could be owned, and that idea grew in relation to the hundreds first.

Before 1066, there were shires and there were hundreds; they were arenas where disputes were settled and where business was transacted. Edgar instructed that everyone should do justice to others in the hundred. This relatively simple pattern did not long survive the Conquest, and there is widespread historiographical consensus that there arose new kinds of court, which embodied and protected the powers and claims that lords demanded from their dependents. The pattern that emerges from the sources is that throughout the eleventh century lords created mechanisms for inserting their influence into assemblies and courts in various ways. There was no single method here; some tried to redraw boundaries so that courts consisted solely of their own dependents upon whom influence might be brought to bear, while others inserted their agents into courts so that they could have a strong influence upon them. Later, lords created units under the hundred, which mostly consisted of their own dependents and not those of other lords. Great churches acting as lords seem often to have been most active in doing this. These kinds of tactics straddle the Conquest, though most examples are first clearly evidenced after 1066. It would seem that something fundamental about lordship is being expressed through these tactics.

Where lords tried any of these methods for enhancing their influence in hundreds, there was generally a strong link to their own dependents, or sometimes to those who they thought should be their own dependents. This indicates that where lordly influence was strengthened in existing assemblies, or where new courts were set up as subdivisions of older assemblies, these developments were really about shaping the relationship between lords and their dependents, rather than mere acquisitiveness. The relationship between lords and their dependents assumed that lords would be in a position to control and discipline their dependents; this was fundamental to the better-documented lords’ courts from the later twelfth century. So far as can be seen, much of this business was done in the hundred before the Norman Conquest, for this was a prime location where lords could manage their dependents, but also a place where those dependents were visible and accessible to the claims of other lords and even the representatives of kings such as sheriffs. Dependents could be exploited by others or even lured away if visible and accessible in these circumstances.

This paper is based on two sources, the Leges Henrici Primi and Quadripartitus. They are the two largest and most important sources for English law in the Anglo-Norman era, and are usually regarded as though they were written by the same individual. Nonetheless, they differ greatly in nature and content. Quadripartitus consists of two parts – the title is attested no earlier than the sixteenth century and is probably misleading – one of which is a translation into Latin of a wide range of pre-Conquest legal documents, prefaced by a lament on the condition of England in the reign of William II, while the other is much shorter, and consists of a few documents of Henry I’s time and an appendix of correspondence, prefaced by an encomium to Henry I. The Leges Henrici Primi – again, the title is an editorial one, more or less misleading, and certainly should not be read as implying any official origin – is a lengthy tract in Latin which sets out in general terms ideas about procedure and conduct in court, and how courts should proceed in cases concerning public order, among other matters, and it draws extensively on the same pre-Conquest legal materials seen in Quadripartitus.

These sources have been used and cited very widely in discussions of a range of problems. In addition to their obvious relevance to legal matters, there is much in them relating to governmental, administrative, and political history, and they are also much used for social history too. Perhaps most important, though, is that they bear on the biggest question of all in Anglo-Norman history: how twelfth-century society and state related to the Anglo-Saxon past, and what the epic events of 1066 and thereafter really signified. That both sources depend so extensively on pre-Conquest written materials supports the belief that these were still sources of authority well into the twelfth century. Quadripartitus is built on the premise that pre-Conquest sources were still of relevance to law, society, and government, as its prefaces assert. Leges Henrici Primi, meanwhile, blends extensive quotation from pre-Conquest documents with much material which was not written exclusively for England, and which incorporates ideas, habits, and arrangements that were unknown here before 1066.