Durham E-Theses Law, Politics, and Political Discourse in Sixteenth-Century Manorial Norfolk MURRELL, CALLUM,DAVID How to cite: MURRELL, CALLUM,DAVID (2021) Law, Politics, and Political Discourse in Sixteenth-Century Manorial Norfolk, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.uk/13919/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support O ce, Durham University, University O ce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: e-theses.uk Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.uk 2 Law, Politics, and Political Discourse in Sixteenth-Century Manorial Norfolk Callum David Murrell Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History University of Durham 2020 1 CONTENTS Preface 8 Chapter One: Introduction 12 Chapter Two: Pleadings 48 Chapter Three: Instruments of Litigation 93 Chapter Four: Law and Equity in the Elizabethan Star Chamber 121 Chapter Five: Law and Politics 154 Conclusion 189 2 ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS TNA - The National Archives DL - Duchy of Lancaster (class within the National Archives) STAC - Star Chamber (class within the National Archives) I have preferred to modernise spelling in quotations from primary texts.
3 COPYRIGHT The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A great many debts are incurred in the writing of a doctoral thesis. The greatest of which is, of course, to my supervisors, Andy Wood and Alex Barber.
Andy has been a constant source of encouragement throughout and I will never be able to sufficiently express my gratitude for how much I have profited from being able to discuss my ideas with him. He has read every word of this thesis, often more than once, and my view of early modern England has been shaped by his thoughtful and incisive criticism. I will miss our supervisions in The Shakespeare, discussing everything from the rough and ready life of Peter Read in sixteenth-century Gimingham to the trials and tribulations of Marxism in social history, and everything in between over a few good pints. Alex has improved my thinking and writing immeasurably.
I am in awe of his precision. He has been a constant source of encouragement in an often discouraging historiographical world, and has always reminded me of the value of intellectual history. I am extremely grateful to all of the staff and colleagues who have supported me throughout my time at Durham. Adrian Green has been especially patient and understanding while I have been writing up and I owe him so many thanks.
Richard Lawrie and the staff in University College provided me with the most amazing support and were a constant source of encouragement in dark and difficult times. I will never be able to repay their kindness and generosity. David Held always had time to discuss important issues with me despite his busy schedule. I benefited enormously from his intellectual generosity and his instinctual kindness.
Stephen Taylor and the staff in Durham’s Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies were extraordinarily generous in offering me the opportunity to chair the work-in-progress seminar series, where I learned a great deal about subjects which I would otherwise know very little. John Morrill was kind enough to offer his time to discuss my ideas on numerous occasions, his encouragement gave me the confidence to pursue avenues I would otherwise have left 5 unexplored. Ashley Walsh provided me with his notes on the history of political thought, which proved most illuminating and added an extra level of depth to this thesis which would otherwise be lacking. Hillary Taylor gave me a place to stay in Cambridge when I needed one; I have learned a great deal from our conversations in the later stages of the thesis.
Rachel Hammersley supervised my undergraduate work at Newcastle and was kind enough to take over as a temporary supervisor in 2018-19 whilst Alex was away. She instilled in me an interest in all things early modern and her insightful comments have improved my work immeasurably. If wealth is judged by the friends one has, I am beyond rich. Gianna Huhn has been a constant companion throughout my time in Durham.
I am deeply grateful for her support in my darkest hours and for the levity she brought to every day thereafter. Ashley Somogyi gave me a place to stay in London whenever I needed it. Her piercing sarcasm and quick wit, as well as her extraordinary kindness, have exerted a formative influence on me throughout this doctorate. Jessica Davidson has been a constant support throughout and has always challenged me to think harder about what matters most.
Jess Jenkins kept me company while we worked in the Tyneside Cinema in the final stages of writing up. Clare Dyckhoff, my twin, has been a constant inspiration and source of encouragement. Simon Hungin put up with my ramblings over lunch and dinner most days during term time for a whole year; his friendship and company through what would otherwise have been a lonely year in Durham helped me write the bulk of this thesis. I will always be immensely grateful.
My most heartfelt thanks I leave to the end. My mum, Marie, my dad, David, and my sister, Holly. They have supported me in countless ways innumerable times. No amount of words can ever do justice to the help, support, encouragement, kindness and love I have received over the years.
This thesis is dedicated to them, with love; for without them, I should not have written one word. 6 For my family. 7 PREFACE I have three main aims in this thesis. The first is simply to interrogate the form and structure of the principle texts produced within the English legal system in the late sixteenth century.
This is obviously a vast and complex undertaking. I have, therefore, limited the scope of the thesis to a consideration of that part of English law known as Equity;1 with a particular focus on two jurisdictions and the texts produced for them: The Palatinate of Lancaster Court of Duchy Chamber, and the High Court of Star Chamber.2 I discuss the instruments of litigation - bills of information and complaint, answers, demurrers, rejoinders, interrogatories, examinations and depositions - produced for both of these courts, in an attempt to explicate their form and structure. Such texts have been used extensively by scholars and a large secondary literature has developed, enriching both the associated scholarship and historiography more broadly. This has led to important challenges of prevailing orthodoxies about early modern legal culture; as well as reflections over, what the scholarship variously defines as, the limits of what legal texts such as court records can demonstrate historically.
Few studies, however, focus on the form and structure of texts in their explanatory hypotheses. This thesis, therefore, addresses that lacuna by making form and structure the foundation of its analysis. It does so through an examination of the structural framework classical and contemporary rhetorical authorities argued was most appropriate for legal disputes: forensic rhetoric. This forensic framework, it is argued, is evident in legal texts throughout the English legal system; this thesis, however, examines texts specifically from the North Norfolk Manor of Gimingham.
This allows the thesis to illustrate the significance of this framework in a 1 Whilst reference will be made to English common law and ecclesiastic or civil law, none of these branches of law will be of primary concern in this thesis. This is not because I treat Equity as the pre-eminent aspect of English law. Rather, as will be addressed later in this introduction, it is motivated by a desire to engage in a particular aspect of the scholarship surrounding social history. 2 Hereafter respectively referred to as the Duchy Chamber and Star Chamber.
My second aim has been to use the principle texts of the English legal system, that is, texts which had juridical significance, to illustrate a more general historical theme.3 This aspiration has two distinct but closely connected strands. The first is that I hope to indicate some of the means by which English law and English legal culture developed in the late sixteenth-century. The distinction here between law and legal culture is fundamental, and forms a cornerstone of much of my argument throughout this thesis. Briefly, the term “law” is taken to refer to the rules established by custom, precedent and statute, which formed the basis of what legal historians commonly refer to as ‘legal doctrine’.
Conversely, I take “legal culture” to refer to the broad milieu surrounding law.4 I will seek to show that a recognisably classical inheritance underpins English law and legal culture to a greater extent than is usually acknowledged. The decisive influence was exerted subtly, through an emphasis on the forms of adversarial legal argument, which were in turn structured to maximise persuasion through reason. One effect of this emphasis was that there began to be a movement away from apodixis in legal proceedings. This in turn enabled those without formal legal training to conceptualise the law as something more than an abstract set of, often seemingly immutable, rules - as a discourse they could participate in, contribute to, and use to their advantage.
This leads on to the second strand of this aspiration, which is to illustrate that legal problems - the issues people take to law - are political problems, they arise out of a particular political context that only gets more complex when the number of participants in it increases to include lawyers and judges. I attempt to demonstrate this by excavating a much wider, but also much more specific, intellectual context for the Gimingham litigation examined throughout this thesis. My third concern is to exemplify a particular way of approaching the study and 3 The distinction between juridical and jurisprudential texts is an important one. This thesis is primarily concerned with the internal operation of the law within the English legal system.
It is not primarily concerned with the philosophy of law (jurisprudence) in an extended sense. 4 See below, Chapter One, Historiography and Scholarship. 9 interpretation of historical texts. As my concluding chapters will make clear, I treat law and politics in early modern England to be inextricably linked.
Attempts to understand law or politics in isolation from one another run the risk of over-simplifying the past and the complex architecture of dependent institutional and social relationships that made up sixteenth century society. This thesis, therefore, sits at the crossroads of social, intellectual, legal and cultural history. It will become clear from the outset of Chapter One that I have been deeply influenced by the analytical concerns of intellectual history, particularly those of the Cambridge School of intellectual historians, but retained an evidentiary base that is almost exclusively a province social historians. This is, as far as I am aware, unique in the scholarship, and perhaps the historiography; therefore, a considerable portion of this introduction will be spent offering a substantive account of the methodological precepts I will attempt to follow throughout this thesis.
Briefly put, however, just as we consider the classic texts or ‘canon’ in the history of political thought, I regard it as essential to consider the intellectual context of all texts in which complex legal and political arguments are set forth.