5 - The administration of justice

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The early thirteenth-century story of Warin of Walcote, the ‘honest itinerant knight’ who fell into poverty after the death of Stephen because he could no longer rob as he had done, may tell us more about later perceptions of the transition from one reign to another than about realities at the time, but the impression of changed circumstances is one borne out by contemporary observers. Henry of Huntingdon and the abbey chroniclers of Battle and Peterborough all claimed that the accession of Henry II brought an end to lawlessness and disorder. Without a civil war, without a disputed succession to the throne, opportunities for violent self-help were much diminished: it was time for old disputes to be peaceably settled, or at least buried until the next conflagration. But if there was now a disposition to resolve conflicts by negotiation or litigation rather than by force, the task which faces historians in tracing the development of processes available for that purpose is by no means straightforward. The first decade of Henry II's reign has been placed by one respected commentator among ‘the most obscure periods of English legal history’. We have no legal treatises to bridge the gap between the Leges Henrici Primi and the Tractatus de Legibus which goes under the name of ‘Glanvill’. Henry II's early pipe rolls rarely give reasons for such fines and amercements as they recorded, so fail us in the search for clues to the nature and extent of judicial activity.