Terry Jones' Medieval Lives by Alan Ereira

perceived wrong, and as the royal courts opened themselves up to appeals of even minor cases from lower courts. The jurisdiction of the boroughs, based on customary law, was thus undermined.
    The borough courts, though, were busy with much more specific matters. Certainly, from the time of the Black Death between 1348 and 1349 and the Statute of Labourers in 1351, which attempted to control wages, local authorities regulated the price of all bread and ale that was sold. The courts used the law to enforce these regulations, and imposed their own systems of punishment (town courts could not outlaw criminals), which ranged from mutilation to forcing traders in bad goods to eat their produce in public, or have their bad drink poured over them. As with rural juries, maintaining the law was a matter of shame and reputation.
    Haggling over basic commodities was illegal, and in most food markets bargaining was punishable by a fine and holding an auction was seen as a criminal act, held in secret. The ‘law of supply and demand’, that insists on higher prices when goods are in short supply, was regarded as anathema and therefore not allowed to operate in these medieval markets.
    It can be argued that the true end of the Middle Ages came in the seventeenth century, when prices were allowed to rise in times of dearth, and the laws of supply and demand took over.
    OUTLAWED BY GOSSIP
    The great achievement of the revolution in English law was that it did not dilute the effectiveness of law as an instrument of royal power, but allied it to the morality and gossip of local communities. This had the paradoxical effect of driving quite a lot of people into outlawry while making outlaws into symbols of righteous disaffection.
    This rhyme was made in the wood, under a laurel tree.
    There sing blackbird and nightingale, and the hawk ranges.
    It was written on parchment to be better remembered ,
    And thrown into the highway so that someone should find it. *3
    This is from a poem of about 1306, which purports to have been written by an outlaw. It gives a fairly clear insight into what might make some men become outlaws.
    According to this outlaw poet, living in medieval England was like living in a neighbourhood-watch police state. Getting on badly with the neighbours was likely to end in indictment, with those neighbours forming the jury:
    Ill-disposed people, from whom God keep his pity ,
    out of their lying mouths have indicted me
    of wicked robberies and other crimes ,
    so that I do not dare to visit my friends . . .
    If these wicked jurors refuse to mend their ways
    so that I may go riding to my country ,
    if I can capture them, I’ll make their heads fly off.
    I’ll not give a penny for all their threatening words.
    Even your own servants could denounce you:
    Sir, if I wish to punish my serving-boy
    with a thump or two, to mend his ways ,
    he will lay information and have me detained ,
    and before I leave jail I must pay a large ransom.
    The gossip of the poet’s neighbours and servants handed power to the local officer of the crown, a man whose main duties had nothing to do with law enforcement but who would naturally seek to make what he could out of his position:
    Forty shillings they take for my ransom ,
    and the sheriff turns up for his bribe
    for not putting me in a deep dungeon.
    Now, lords, consider, is this fair?
    In the mid-thirteenth century many poor people refused to attend their trials and were therefore labelled ‘outlaws’. The wealthy could handle the legal system by paying bribes – it was said they were hanged by the purse, as a poor man would be hanged by the neck. The literate had their own way of escape by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’ – anyone who could read a line of scripture in Latin was taken to be in holy orders, and was therefore entitled to be turned over to an ecclesiastical court where the severest sentences were usually degradation and the imposition of