Tag: medieval law

When did kings start allowing land to be bought and sold?

It’s a bit complicated. To quote myself:

In Medieval England, for example, the feudal principle of “Nulle terre sans seigneur” (no land without a lord) meant that selling land outright, known as “alienation of lands by will,” was actually legally impossible until the late 12th century. (The Magna Carta, for example, says that “No free man shall henceforth give or sell so much of his land as that out of the residue he may not sufficiently do to the lord of the fee the service which pertains to that fee.”) Selling land was legalized by the Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290, although the buyer was “required to assume all tax and feudal obligations of the original tenant,” so the land remained under the same lord as before. It wasn’t until the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660 that those feudal obligations were eliminated.

I think there are arguments you could make for either 1290 or 1660 as “when…kings start allowing land to be bought and sold,” although more accurately it was a gradual process, owing as much to decisions about enforcement and legal fights over whether feudal obligations once allowed to lapse could be invoked later on, that spans the two dates. 

When discussing the Martells travelling to KL for the royal wedding, Mace Tyrell gets miffed at the notion of them “crossing his lands without asking his leave”. I get that he’s just being extra, but does he have a legal leg to stand on? Can a lord deny another lord from simply travelling across his lands?

If the Martells were using roads which are open to all (see below), then probably not. However, if the Martells were trying to use a proprietary bridge or toll road or cross someone’s fields without their permission, there the Tyrells would have more of a leg to stand on.

magicbeardpowers asks:

If an individual lord or group of lords wanted to put a proper road through their land, would they have to get the king’s or lord paramount’s permission, like they would a city charter or to build a dam? 

You did see attempts by lords to exert authority over roads on their lands – usually by trying to levy tolls – but as time went on, kings successfully asserted the legal principle that main roads were considered “public thoroughfares” and under the protection of the king, and then in the later Middle Ages merged that concept with nuisance law, whereby obstructions, enclosures, or interference with public thoroughfares were considered to be injurious to the commonweal and damage to royal property, which gave the king two separate avenues for exerting authority over roads.

However, note the use of the word “public” there. Whether a road was considered a public thoroughfare could depend on certain factors: did the road lead to a town, port, or market, was the road listed as particularly belonging to the king (Fosse Way, Ermine Street, Watling Street, and the Icknield Way were called the “king’s four highways” in English law), and had it traditionally been open to the public. 

But to answer your question, I would guess on principle that if the road was contained within the fiefdom of a lord and hadn’t traditionally been open to the public and it wasn’t a road that the overlord had asserted ownership over, they probably could do it without permission. 

In Medieval Saxon law a man who would throw a woman on the ground against her will, would forfeit the king’s grace. What does “the king’s grace” mean in this context?

Good question!

It’s a bit hard to tell, because as far as I can tell the phrase “forfeits the king’s grace” only comes up with reference to Saxon law on rape. 

My best guess, from a mention in the writings of Sir Francis Palgrave, is that it has to do with the king’s prerogative to show mercy:

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If my surmise is right, this would suggest that, if a man threw a woman on the ground against her will, the king was not allowed to reduce the penalty for the crime. Think of it like the medieval equivalent of a mandatory minimum sentence. 

What was wage labor like in feudalism? I know it wasn’t hourly before clocks were around and stuff like that, but how was it thought of? Did they have the concept of employer and employee of a company (or the concept of a company outside of whatever the mercenaries count as). Did taking wages for work affect your class, maybe making you more than a serf but less than a skilled craftsman?

In terms of when you got paid, it depended. Most wage laborers were paid daily, but in some cases you could be paid weekly, monthly, or even yearly. 

Companies were very rare, and required special licenses and legislation to set up (think things like the East India Trading Company or the Muscovy Company) because they were monopolies. So in most cases, wage labor took place between an owner-operator and their worker.

In terms of how it was thought of in class terms, it’s a bit complicated. 

On the one hand, you had a significant body of journeymen who were paid wages, and they were significantly above serfs although below master craftsmen. Journeymen were legally free and no longer bound as apprentices were, they had property in their tools, they had certain rights (and responsibilities) as guild members, etc. And below the journeymen, you had a population of (unskilled) free laborers who worked for wages as well. 

On the other hand, a significant percent of the population (about 4-5% in rural areas and 11-17% in urban areas) were servants. And servants had a different status than other wage workers. To quote Steinfeld:

“Servants were different from other wage workers – laborers and artificers – who occupied separate social and legal niches. Servants ordinarily were single and had not yet established households of their own. Hence, they lived with their masters and served them full time for a term. Laborers generally were married and maintained their own households. In most instances, they did not serve for a term, but worked on a casual basis by the day, week, or task…

Servants were “in the service of another.” But laborers and artificers [i.e, artisans], who did not live with their employers, might be employed by one person today and someone else tomorrow or next week, or they might…simultaneously undertake a number of different tasks for different persons.”

This distinction had important legal consequences: because they were part of someone’s household, servants were under the legal control of the master of the household; servants weren’t free to leave their employer until their term of service was up; etc.  

Say a peasant had a crippled child or infants to care for or nature was not cooperating or all of the above. Was it possible to appeal to his local Lord for a reprieve on his obligations? Obviously it would depend on the Lord’s character but I’m curious if there was flexibility in the system given 100% exploitation all the time seems like an impractical model yet on the face of it feudal contracts seem hilariously one sided and unfeeling.

Yep, happened all the time. Feudal obligations were very much tied to all kinds of traditions, which included things like tax or rent exemptions for a given period or privileges (collecting firewood from the lord’s forest, being allowed to trap rabbits in the lord’s deer park, gleaning grain after the harvest on the lord’s fields, etc.) or even donations (old clothes, leftovers, maybe some money). 

So there was always a back-and-forth, where peasants pushed as far as they think they could get, and lords always had to shift on a spectrum from granting those favors when it suited their interests to be seen as generous to denying them if they felt their revenues were being cut into too much. 

It’s actually not that different from the ways that scholars of slavery have talked about slave systems involving both resistance and accomodation as well as terror, brutality, and exploitation. 

What is the difference between a city charter and a town charter? What are the advantages each brings? Also how does a charter affect the people and how would a Lord Paramount or the King grant a charter? Does someone ask for one or does the Lord/King decide where the new city or town will be built and how?

City charters offer more extensive rights than town charters (and generally speaking, if a city had a city charter, it would include the rights of a town charter but not vice-versa). So for example, a town charter might provide borough rights (i.e, its inhabitants are burghers not peasants) and some measure of self-government but only a city charter would give you the staple or storage right (which was necessary to conduct international trade). a town charter might give you the right to hold a market but you might need a city charter to the right to establish a warehouse (which was very important for long-distance, international, and bulk trade). 

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In terms of how a charter affects the residents of a town, it provided a whole host of legal, political, and economic opportunities that could change one’s status enormously. Being a burgher meant that you not only had the right to live in the town, but that you were a free person under the law and not a serf. Living in a chartered town or city probably meant that there were guilds you could join and become a member of, and it definitely meant access to markets and trade and occupations that could not be accessed outside of that town/city. It might mean that there was a city government that you could vote for or run for office in if you got wealthy enough. 

While there are cases of charters being granted ahead of construction – often as a means of enticing people to move to a new (and therefore risky) settlement – usually, the settlement would predate the charter. The way it normally worked is that you had a settlement of people who would petition the king or overlord for a charter, the charter would be written out and sealed (as we see above), and there would be a big ceremony where the king/overlord would present the charter to the city government, after which the city would now exist as a legal corporation. 

Tyrion mentions that the Westerlings had sold off a large portion of their lands. How exactly would such a transaction take place in a feudal economy? Would there be restrictions on who they could sell to and for how much?

Discussed somewhat here. 

The Westerlings selling their land is a highly unusual event in Westeros – the only other times we hear about selling land is in the context of the Tarbecks forcing people to sell their land through threat of armed force, so voluntary (to the extent that the necessities of poverty qualify as voluntary) land sales are a sign that the feudal order is in crisis. 

It suggests that the Westerlings were falling into genteel poverty, such that their rental income had fallen massively behind their ability to service their debt, and that they were having to surrender the collateral they had put up to secure the loan. 

Legally, this could be quite tricky. In Medieval England, for example, the feudal principle of “Nulle terre sans seigneur” (no land without a lord) meant that selling land outright, known as “alienation of lands by will,” was actually legally impossible until the late 12th century. (The Magna Carta, for example, says that “No free man shall henceforth give or sell so much of his land as that out of the residue he may not sufficiently do to the lord of the fee the service which pertains to that fee.”) Selling land was legalized by the Statute of Quia Emptores in 1290, although the buyer was “required to assume all tax and feudal obligations of the original tenant,” so the land remained under the same lord as before. It wasn’t until the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660 that those feudal obligations were eliminated.