Skip to main content

IMC 2018: Sessions

Session 1636: Fiat iustitia: The Practice of Law inside and outside the Courts

Thursday 5 July 2018, 11.15-12.45

Moderator/Chair:Matthew McHaffie, Department of History, King's College London
Paper 1636-aYouthful Offenders in the Courts of 13th- and 14th-Century Ireland
(Language: English)
Bridgette Slavin, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Medaille College, New York
Index terms: Law
Paper 1636-bBetween the Tactics of the Weak and the Technology of Power: Memory in a Florentine Criminal Court, c. 1343-1363
(Language: English)
Joseph Figliulo-Rosswurm, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara
Index terms: Daily Life, Law, Social History
Paper 1636-cLegal Business outside the Courts: Private and Public Houses as Spaces of Law in the 15th Century
(Language: English)
Edda Frankot, Research Institute of Irish & Scottish Studies, University of Aberdeen
Index terms: Archives and Sources, Economics - Urban, Law, Social History
Abstract

Paper -a:
The justiciary rolls of medieval Ireland offer detailed documentation of criminal justice in the areas under English control in Ireland during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Informative as these documents are, they do not provide a complete view of law in Anglo-Norman Ireland, as traditional Irish law continued to be enforced in areas outside the influence of English governance. Scholars of medieval Ireland are fortunate to have Bronagh NĂ­ Chonaill's detailed analysis of childhood in traditional Irish law; however, more information remains to be analyzed regarding the legal recognition of childhood in medieval Ireland, particularly in the areas outside of the purview of traditional Irish law. This paper will analyze the prosecution of children for delinquent behavior in the justiciary rolls in an attempt to identify what these records reveal about perceptions of childhood in late medieval Ireland.

Paper -b:
This paper examines criminal inquests originating from anonymous denunciations to examine how memory shaped rural communities' response to expanded institutions of public justice in mid-14th-century Tuscany. The paper argues that manipulation of memory, collective and individual, deflected invasive investigations. Witnesses cited in criminal inquests against elite malefactors usually claimed to 'forget everything concerning the said inquest', and these claims of ignorance mapped onto residency, indicating a collective choice of non-compliance with the court's investigations. When witnesses cooperated, this was against locals whose actions threatened social peace. Collective efforts to shape when to remember and forget local conflicts thus maintained social harmony in small communities.

Paper -c:
The Liber Testium from Kampen (Netherlands) names taverns and private houses as spaces where legal business was conducted. This business ranged from sales and the recruitment of servants to reconciliations. Witnesses, referred to as 'wijncoepslude', would confirm agreements between parties through the drinking of wine. This paper will analyse these practices, and aim to answer whether the space had a specific function in these cases and whether the legal business conducted in private houses temporarily transformed them to public venues. A comparison with Aberdeen, where notarial acts were recorded in taverns and private houses, will also be conducted.