Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen ElizabethReilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: The First Thousand Years: 600 - 1600: King Aethelbert - Queen Elizabeth
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
No lord may distrain any of his tenants. No one may drive animals
taken by distraint out of the shire where they have been taken.
"Farmers during their terms, shall not make waste, sale, nor
exile of house, woods, and men, nor of any thing else belonging
to the tenements which they have to farm".
Henry de Bracton, a royal judge and the last great ecclesiastical
lawyer, wrote an unfinished treatise: A Tract on the Laws and
Customs of England, systematizing and organizing the law of the
court rolls with definitions and general concepts and describing
court practice and procedure. It was influenced by his knowledge
of Roman legal concepts, such as res judicata, and by his own
opinions, such as that the law should go from precedent to
precedent. He also argued that the will and intent to injure was
the essence of murder, so that neither an infant nor a madman
should be held liable for such and that degrees of punishment
should vary with the level of moral guilt in a killing. He
thought the deodand to be unreasonable.
Bracton defines the requirements of a valid and effective gift
as: "It must be complete and absolute, free and uncoerced,
extorted neither by fear nor through force. Let money or service
play no part, lest it fall into the category of purchase and
sale, for if money is involved there will them be a sale, and if
service, the remuneration for it. If a gift is to be valid the
donor must be of full age, for if a minor makes a gift it will be
ineffective since (if he so wishes) it shall be returned to him
in its entirety when he reaches full age. Also let the donor
hold in his own name and not another's, otherwise his gift may
be revoked. And let him, at the least, be of sound mind and good
memory, though an invalid, ill and on his death bed, for a gift
make under such conditions will be good if all the other
[requirements] of a valid gift are met. For no one, provided he
is of good memory, ought to be kept from the administration or
disposition of his own property when affected by infirmity,
since it is only then that he must make provision for his
family, his household and relations, given stipends and settle
his bequests; otherwise such persons might suffer damage without
fault. But since charters are sometimes fraudulently drawn and
gifts falsely taken to be made when they are not, recourse must
therefore be had to the country and the neighborhood so that the
truth may be declared."
In Bracton's view, a villein could buy his own freedom and the
child of a mixed marriage was free unless he was born in the
tenement of his villein parent.
Judicial Procedure
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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