Northern Legal History Group Presentations

About this event

UCL’s Legal History Research Group (LHRG) is pleased to host presentations from members of the Northern Legal History Group. The Northern Legal History Group was founded with the purpose of promoting both the study of Legal History in the North of England and of the North of England. The Group is committed to creating a forum for research that advances our understanding of the legal history of the region and its impact on the development of the law in England and beyond.

This workshop will include presentations by:

• Dr Emily Ireland (Liverpool),
• Dr Ashley Hannay (Manchester), and
• Dr Sarah White (Nottingham).

The papers

Dr Emily Ireland (Liverpool):
‘Degrees’ of Married Women’s Legal Personhood in Eighteenth-Century England

Legal personhood is a concept that has proved slippery and changeable over time. Whilst the eighteenth century saw increasing popularity of the idea that every English citizen was entitled to complete equality under the rule of law, many scholars have shown how the law affected distinct groups of society differently. Legal status, and thus legal personhood, was not a ‘one-size fits all’ concept. It was, in fact, a concept that did as much to situate individuals outside of the law as it did to place them within it. In addition to, and to a large extent because of, the prejudices of eighteenth-century England, subordinated members of society were often bestowed with fewer legal rights than English adult men. Accessing and utilising the law was easier for some English subjects than others.

Married women, as a legal category, are an oft-cited example of this phenomenon. The doctrine of coverture severely curtailed wives’ access to the law and use of legal agency. This paper examines the language and methods judges and treatise-writers used to justify the truncated legal personhood bestowed upon married women in eighteenth-century England. It will discuss how lawmakers actively made assessments of married women’s worth in comparison to themselves, other subordinated persons, or on an individual basis in relation to other married women. Therefore, only a holistic assessment of lawmakers’ conceptualisation of the legal status of subordinated persons in eighteenth-century England can demonstrate the diversity in how individuals experienced the law.

Dr Ashley Hannay (Manchester)
Litigation Levels in the County Palatine of Lancaster, 1351 to 1569
 
Litigation levels in later medieval England are notoriously difficult to calculate. One particular challenge is the sheer volume of material that has survived. As Maitland observed, by Edward I’s reign the surviving records were ‘already an overwhelming mass; perhaps no one man will ever read them all’. Furthermore, the jurisdictional divide between the Courts of Chancery, Common Pleas, Exchequer, and King’s Bench was blurred. It was not uncommon for litigation to be commenced in more than one court for the same suit. The work of Marjorie Blatcher and Eric Ives in the 1970s and 80s sought to address these shortcomings by calculating litigation levels based on judicial profits from sealing fees and the court’s docket rolls respectively. Although these records are more manageable, they are woefully incomplete. This paper seeks to address a number of these issues by considering the levels of litigation within the Palatine of Lancaster.
 
A County Palatine was a feudal state in miniature. The Palatine of Lancaster was created in 1351 when Edward III granted Henry de Grosmont, 4th Earl of Lancaster, the title Duke of Lancaster, in addition to the ‘liberties and royal rights pertaining to an Earl Palatine’ in the county of Lancaster. This allowed the duke to have his own Chancery and to appoint his own justices to hear Common and Crown Pleas within the County of Lancaster. Unlike those of the central Westminster courts, the records that survive from the Palatine are both manageable and relatively complete. Indeed, as Baker notes, in the time of Henry VIII, we have a remarkably complete record of the work of a Common Law court. This paper outlines what these records tell us about litigation levels within the Palatine and considers the national and local factors which may contribute to the subtle differences in the results when compared to the work of Blatcher and Ives on Westminster.
 
Dr Sarah White (Nottingham)
Legacies and Legalities: Bequests of Land to Ecclesiastical Institutions in England c. 1180-1300

In English testamentary history, there is a clear divide between Anglo- Saxon and Anglo-Norman testamentary practice, with the primary difference being that in the latter case, heritable land could not be bequeathed. Once the transfer of land required the livery of seisin (a formal legal conveyancing ceremony wherein the transferor gave the transferee a physical piece of the ground itself), a practice introduced during the reign of Henry II (1154-89), it was not possible for a gift of land to take effect upon the death of the owner, and the royal courts did not consider the intention to dispose of a tenement, as expressed in a will, sufficient in itself to complete the transfer. Nonetheless, an examination of extant wills from the period 1180-1300 demonstrates that some testators (or indeed beneficiaries) may have thought that bequests of land were possible or even enforceable. How do these wills fit into the legal framework of the time? If a bequest of land could not be enforced in the royal courts, why might someone attempt to make one, and how might they try to ensure that the bequest held? Drawing on an extensive collection of wills from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this paper considers whether how people understood and used these documents in a period of substantial legal change, providing a fresh perspective on autonomy in testamentary history.

Schedule:

16:45 Registration
17:00 Presentations begin
19:00 Event ends

This event is open to anyone with an interest in Legal History and is free of charge.

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