Law at the village level

Our tutoring consultant raises the hue and cry.

Our tutor is unhappy (again? still?) with the way the Advanced Placement World History course is being taught.  He concedes that it is a valid approach to organize a mass of information by a set of themes, broken up into chronological and geographical areas.  Indeed, it may be the only way to get such information into the heads of a mass of students so that the minimum leaks out.  But it definitely loses something along the way.  And it’s clear even to the students that two pages is not enough to cover the Renaissance.  So he dreams of other approaches.  We’ve already mentioned his idea of using the Holy Roman Empire as a central idea.

Recently he came upon the term “view of frank-pledge” in a book he was rereading.  This comes from Medieval English law, in which each person in society was part of a frank-pledge group, about a dozen strong.  If the person was accused of some crime, it was the group’s responsibility to produce him at court.  If he fled, it was their responsibility to “raise the hue and cry,” which meant warning everybody around by making noise, and then pursuing and capturing him if they could.  The “view of frank-pledge” began as an operation to make sure that everyone was in a proper frank-pledge group, and seems to have evolved into a police court handling minor and intermediate offenses.

Why bother with an obscure and obsolete legal term?  Well, it emphasizes the fact that justice at the local level was very different in the past.  With no police force and only a rudimentary administration in a rough and violent time, people were required to keep each other in line.  It was not confined to England; the Icelandic Sagas depict something similar in the Nordic cousins.  Indeed, justice itself was the task of the family in archaic Greece.  It was the duty of the next of kin to avenge a murder by killing the perpetrator.  The transition from crime as a family affair to one of public order is depicted in the three tragic plays of the Oresteia.

So our tutor dreams of approaching history through local justice.  Certainly the actions of courts (or what served as courts) at the village level were far more important to the mass of people than the proclamations of kings or dukes.  How were crimes discovered, and criminals caught, judged and punished?  How did one get compensation for a wrong?  It would be of vital importance whether the local baron had been granted courts of low or high justice by the king.  And the central role of justice guarantees that we have a comparative wealth of material, even such things as the speeches of ancient Roman lawyers.

This approach would illuminate many aspects of life in past ages, and (perhaps more important) show that the present arrangement is neither inevitable nor necessarily ideal.  Who would you accept in your frank-pledge group?