The Mad Monk of Gidleigh

Author’s Note

There are some aspects of medieval life which often give rise to confusion, and it’s probably a good idea to clear up some of them before launching into another story.

Even the most basic concepts of medieval law can give us difficulties. Nowadays we think of the ‘parish’ as being the smallest political and administrative unit. The parish, though, was a Tudor invention, largely designed to deal with problems with the poor. It didn’t exist in the early 1300s, when the smallest unit was the ‘vill’. A Norman term, it could mean anything from a tiny hamlet to a borough, or even areas lumped together to form a city.

Every man who was not a magnate, knight or his kinsman, cleric or some other form of freeman, had to be in a ‘tithing’. Basically this meant that every man was part of a group of ten, twelve, or maybe more men. (A ‘tithe’ literally means one tenth.) In the less populated rural south and west of England, a vill tended to be a tithing. When a man became ‘outlaw’, he lost his place within a tithing. This was crucial to medieval life because he was now without any protection. Not even the tithingman, the leader of the tithing, would speak up for him.

Each boy, on reaching adulthood at the age of twelve years, must join his frankpledge and swear to keep the law. On making the oath, he immediately became liable for keeping the peace himself, and liable for damages – both for his own actions and the actions of other members of his tithing. Frankpledge, or frank pledge, as the words suggest, were an imposition of the Normans after the invasion, but based upon a mistranslation of the Old English frithborh, which meant ‘peace-pledge’. Under the Normans, this became a tool for control of the peasants.

Every peasant was responsible for keeping the peace in his tithing and was legally responsible to, amongst others, all his neighbours. That was why onlookers would pile in to calm fights, stop robbers, even soothe bickering between a husband and wife. It was an effective means of self-policing.

Here I should point out that women were not included in tithings, nor did they have to join a frankpledge. Women and children couldn’t be ‘outlawed’ for the excellent reason that they were never ‘inlawed’. However, they could be ‘waived’, which had the same unpleasant implications.

There are far too many books on the history of British law for me to list them all here, but Pollock & Maitland’s History of English Law is an excellent start.

The Keeper of the King’s Peace had a unique role to play within the legal machinery of England.

In each county, a number of courts would each month record offences that should be considered by the King’s own judges. Some men were imprisoned ready to be hauled before the judges, others would be set loose, after a payment to guarantee their appearance in court. Then, once a year, the Sheriff would come on his ‘Tourn’ to consider all the cases. Finally, the King’s Justices would arrive, usually once every ten years or so, and would listen to all cases outstanding, issuing swift justice. If you doubt this, consider that during the Eyre of 1238, the Justices disposed of some thirty pleas each day. And a losing petitioner in a matter of felony would have been taken out immediately to be hanged!

The point here is that the Sheriff and the Justices were turning up a long while after many of the offences had been committed. The primary purpose of the Coroners and Keepers was thus to ‘Keep’ – that is, maintain a record – of the offences. In the case of the Coroners, they had the task of investigating every sudden death; they also had to visit wrecks, and record discoveries of treasure trove.

We have, from Kent, several copies of the Keepers’ Rolls, which were investigated in 1933 by B. Putnam PhD for the Kent Archaeological Society. She discovered that in the terrible years of King Edward II’s reign, the job of Keeper changed quite dramatically.

Initially, in December 1307, their duties were: to enforce the peace and the statute of Westminster; to arrest those who resisted and keep them in custody until the King commanded otherwise; to maintain the coinage and prices; and attach coiners and forestallers. This is a good series of duties, along with maintaining the records, but in 1314 the job had expanded to: enforcing the peace and the statute; inquiry by sworn inquest of trespasses and crimes; arrest of those indicted by the inquests; pursuit, if necessary, with the posse comitatus from vill to vill, hundred to hundred, shire to shire, and imprisonment until lawful delivery by the command of the King; to submit a monthly report to the King’s Council of names of malefactors; mandate to the Sheriff to assist and empanel jurors. There was also a promise of ‘supervisors’ to ‘determine’ their indictments.

Thus, in the space of seven years, the job had grown to give Keepers the job of catching and arresting crooks and seeing them in court. By 1316 these duties had expanded again to include holding formal inquests into felons and felonies. Probably these developments were nothing more than a proof of the disastrous early years of the century, with famine, disease and war leading to an inevitable increase in crime as the poor struggled to survive.

There is another fascinating insight which we glean from the Kent records. Putnam looked at the records of Gaol Delivery for the same period, and then correlated the names. Interestingly, she found that many of the Justices of Gaol Delivery were the Keepers who had originally tried a man and sent him to gaol in the first place (Gaol Delivery meant that the suspect was delivered from gaol to the judge to have his case decided). In the same way, it was not uncommon for a juror who had decided upon a man’s guilt during the original inquest, to then sit on the jury of Gaol Delivery.

We know very little, sadly, about how the inquests would have been conducted since there are no extant records written by an independent viewer; however, by looking at the set-up of other courts, it is clear that the same general procedures appear to have prevailed, and thus we may extrapolate from them to see how Baldwin might have run his court.

While looking at Baldwin’s role, it would be unfair not to briefly mention Simon’s, because the Bailiff’s duties were as extensive in many ways.

The Bailiff of Lydford was the servant of the Stannaries, the ancient tin mining areas of Devon (Cornwall had its own system and its own Stannary). Key areas of responsibility were situated in the centre of Dartmoor, but I believe that his territory was much wider than this. He was responsible for preventing fights and arguments between miners and local landowners, and mining didn’t stop with the old forest of Dartmoor. As a proof of this, one need only consider that the stannary towns of Tavistock, Ashburton and Chagford, were all outside the known extent of the forest of Dartmoor.

These towns were all administrative centres. Each Stannary town controlled its own territory from the perspective of collecting tolls and taxes. However, the Warden of the Stannaries was in overall charge, and it was his duty to present any criminals who had committed felonies before the King’s Justices.

The Warden delegated his responsibilities widely, especially during the wardenship of Abbot Champeaux of Tavistock, because the good Abbot had far too many other things on his plate to be able to watch over every transaction. Thus many tasks were given to his bailiffs. We know that in the 1300s his bailiff was fined for failing to arrest suspects and bring them to Lydford to the castle purpose-built as the Stannary Gaol. The bailiff would have been a man used to working on his own, a negotiator, someone capable of calming fights between miners or disputes between landowners and miners; he himself sometimes had to resort to violence. He would have been a local man, someone who knew the moors reasonably well, but who understood men and could assess them swiftly.

This is the sort of man Simon was – rugged, determined, sure of his own authority in the name of the Abbot, and committed to serving his master.

For more information on the Stannaries, look at H.P.R. Finberg’s Tavistock Abbey (Cambridge University Press) and Sandy Gerrard’s The Early British Tin Industry (Tempus Publishing).

Michael Jecks

Northern Dartmoor

April 2002