LAW & LITERATURE WORKSHOP SERIES 2008-2009
presents
Professor Jamie Taylor
Bryn Mawr College Department of English
MURDER IN NORFOLK: NEIGHBORS, WITNESSES,
AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF COMMUNITY
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
12:30 - 2:00
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
Solarium (room FA2)
84 Queen's Park
This essay examines the role of the neighbor in late medieval legal process, arguing that shifts in legal procedure offer an ideal of neighborliness that departs from the theological model of neighborly charity. Specifically, I explore how emergent testimonial systems in fourteenth century law courts set the stage for alternative modes of justice developed by bands of outlaws.
The theological call in Matthew to love your neighbor as yourself offers scriptural support for the doctrinal requirements of charity, doctrinal requirements that become particularly urgent in impoverished, post-plague England. Yet neighborliness also becomes a central feature of legal process after Henry II's Assize of Clarendon (1166), which dictated that 12 of every 100 men, called œviciniâ or neighbors, must report suspicious behavior to the royal sheriff, who would submit a writ to Westminster to begin criminal proceedings. These œviciniâ were also primary witnesses during the trial, and their testimony held particular weight. The idea that neighbors were to report on one another inaugurates, I argue, an ideal of neighborly suspicion, an ideal that subsumes the locality of the vill beneath royal (and thus inchoately national) law. In other words, late medieval legal process attempted to reconceptualize neighborliness as loyalty to the Crown, even at the expense of loyalty to one's local community. Yet bands of outlaws like the Folville gang used neighborliness to construct an alternative community, outside the confines of royal law, with its own system of government. Legal neighborliness thus accommodates and articulates a range of juridical communities in the fourteenth century.
After mapping the development of legal neighborliness, this essay argues that the ideal of neighborly suspicion oddly intersects with the doctrinal ideal of neighborly charity. I turn to a little-studied fourteenth-century sermon by the Augustinian John Waldeby as an illuminating case study of the legal underpinnings of fourteenth-century ideals of neighborliness and charity. Waldeby condemns a Norfolk community for failing to be charitable when they refuse to testify against a neighbor for a murder. Because Norfolk residents have maintained silence in the name of neighborliness, he argues, they are all outlaws. Moreover, because they have refused their neighborly duty to testify against a local criminal, they have turned God into an outlaw. While this initially sounds like a condemnation of false witness and a reinstantiation of the righteousness of royal legal procedure, I suggest that we might read Waldeby's suggestion that God could be an outlaw as a support for alternative modes of justice that reject the nationalizing impulse of late medieval royal law.
This workshop is co-sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
