Crime and the Frankpledge

The prosecution of crime in medieval England worked according to the so-called ‘frankpledge system’, according to which every freeman belonged to a tithing responsible for reporting crimes or suspicious deaths to the local court of the hundred or the vill. It was within the tithing that the ‘hue and cry’ would be raised to arrest criminals suspected of malfeasance. Rather as today, when those who exercise a restaurant franchise are supposed to deliver up a standard meal but are themselves ultimately responsible for the profits and complaints that their franchise may generate, so, in the Middle Ages, large parts of England were ‘franchised’ out to lords and barons who themselves took the profits of justice and bore responsibility for trial and punishment, up to and including the erection of gallows for the execution of felons. Certain pleas, the pleas of the crown such as homicide, rape or arson, were in theory tried only in the King’s courts. Nonetheless, cases in which the criminal was caught red-handed might be tried and punished by any local franchise-holder with right of gallows.

From 1194, local coroners appointed within each county were responsible for the investigation of sudden or suspicious deaths, and the county community of the knights also discharged public duties, serving on juries within the county court, and turning out, supposedly in large numbers, when the county ‘posse’, a term later exported from England to the United States, was required for national defence or to arrest and apprehend particularly notorious felons. Offences that directly concerned the King could be transferred to the royal courts of the county or of the crown itself, these latter ‘crown courts’ at this stage including the infrequent visitations of the country by the King’s justices (the ‘eyre’), the more regular sessions held before royal justices at Westminster (the Court of Common Pleas, or the ‘Bench’) and special sessions held before the King in person, the so-called court ‘Coram Rege’. At virtually every stage in criminal prosecution, it was nonetheless the local community which bore chief responsibility for defence against crime. Since large numbers of tithings answered not to the King’s jurisdiction but to hundred courts in the hands of barons, or to town courts with their own oligarchic system of communal government, the King’s court processed only a small part of the criminal justice system.

Even gaols, which were maintained by the King and his officers in royal castles and the great county towns, were elsewhere where often in baronial rather than royal custody, albeit with the King claiming the right to fine lords who permitted prisoners to escape. The greater private liberties, such as the bishopric of Ely, maintained their own prisons and their own courts for the exercise of jurisdiction, even over criminal cases detected within their private liberties. The bishop of Ely’s prison survived until 1836. The privately controlled soke of Peterborough, relic of the liberty of Peterborough Abbey dissolved in the 1530s, maintained its own prison until 1877 and had the theoretical right, last exercised in 1812, to impose capital punishment as late as 1971. Instead of a nationwide police force, the King’s capacity to maintain the law depended upon local officers, often no more than the gangs of serjeants who gathered around his sheriffs and constables and who just as often caused as quelled disorder.

When the courtier William Brewer attempted to transfer large quantities of silver coin from Cumberland southwards in 1204, for example, to pay a fine owed at the royal Exchequer, it was the men of the local sheriff who ambushed and robbed the baggage train, stealing more than £60 in silver pennies as well as the helmets, hauberks and horses with which Brewer’s servants had been travelling. The depredations caused by King John’s sheriff of Nottingham are still a byword for royal tyranny. A man named Baldwin Tyrel was heard in 1212 spreading rumours in Cornwall about the supposed murder of King John. His words were reported to the local sheriff, but Baldwin himself would have walked free had it not been for two of the King’s household knights who, claiming that they were sworn to report all such rumours, took it upon themselves to arrest Baldwin so that he might be brought before the King for trial and sentencing. Most notoriously, it was the rallying cry of the royal household, ‘Reaux, Reaux!’, that had rung out at Canterbury in December 1170, bellowed by the four murderers of Thomas Becket as they fled from the scene of their crime.

As this implies, whatever kings themselves might claim about their public responsibilities as the chosen instruments of God’s justice, it was force, or the threat of force, that underpinned all royal authority. No king could rule, however velvet his gloves, unless there was a fist of iron to back up his claims to authority. By 1200, indeed almost certainly by the 1130s, there was already a major force of knights and sergeants attached to the King’s household, augmented in time of war by mercenaries and paid muscle, the forerunners of the sergeants-at-arms, by the fourteenth century the chief enforcers of royal authority in the English localities. In ordinary circumstances, the King held so great a balance of military power within the realm that no one could resist his will for long. Even in the reigns of Stephen or King John, when relations between King and barons dissolved into acrimony and civil war, the sheer military might of the royal household and its attendant army of Flemish, Welsh or southern French mercenaries, was sufficient to maintain an unpopular ruler on his throne, in the case of Stephen for a decade or more. Set against the King, however, was a tradition of local baronial or municipal rights to the exercise of power, of knights accustomed to public service, and of communities scattered from one end of England to another, already conscious of their own responsibilities not just in the preservation of public peace but in the interests of a public good often easily distinguishable from the interests of a predatory royal administration.

A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485
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