Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776: June 2011 (Sixth) EditionReilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776: June 2011 (Sixth) Edition
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
The main governmental activities were: war, collection of revenue,
religious education, and administration of justice. For war, the shires
had to provide a certain number of men and the ports quotas of ships
with crews. The king was the patron of the English church. He gave the
church peace and protection. He presided over church councils and
appointed bishops. As for the administration of justice, the public
courts were almost all under members of Edward's court, bishops, earls,
and reeves. Edward's mind was often troubled and disturbed by the threat
that law and justice would be overthrown, by the pervasiveness of
disputes and discord, by the raging of wicked presumption, by money
interfering with right and justice, and by avarice kindling all of
these. He saw it as his duty to courageously oppose the wicked by taking
good men as models, by enriching the churches of God, by relieving those
oppressed by wicked judges, and by judging equitably between the
powerful and the humble. He was so greatly revered that a comet was
thought to accompany his death.
The king established the office of the Chancery to draft documents and
keep records. It created the writ, which was a small piece of parchment
[sheep skin] addressed to a royal official or dependent commanding him
to perform some task for the King. By the 1000s A.D., the writ contained
a seal: a lump of wax with the impress of the Great Seal of England
which hung from the bottom of the document. Writing was done with a
sharpened goose-wing quill. Ink was obtained from mixing fluid from the
galls made by wasps for their eggs on oak trees, rainwater or vinegar,
gum arabic, and iron salts for color.
A King's grant of land entailed two documents: a charter giving
boundaries and conditions and a writ, usually addressed to the shire
court, listing the judicial and financial privileges conveyed with the
land. These were usually sac and soke [possession of jurisdiction of a
private court of a noble or institution to execute the laws and
administer justice over inhabitants and tenants of the estate], toll
[right to have a market and to collect a payment on the sale of cattle
and other property on the estate] and team [probably the right to hold a
court to determine the honesty of a man accused of illegal possession of
cattle or of buying stolen cattle by inquiring of the alleged seller or
a warrantor, even if an outsider], and infangenetheof [the authority to
hang and take the chattels of a thief caught on the estate].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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