"Farmers during their terms, shall not make waste, sale, nor exile of house, woods, and men, nor of any thing else belonging to the tenements which they have to farm".
Church law required that planned marriages be publicly announced [banns]by the priest so that any impediment could be made known. If a marriage was clandestine or both parties knew of an impediment, or it was within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, the children would be illegitimate. According to church rules, a man could bequeath his personal property subject to certain family rights. These were that if only the wife survived, she received half the property. Similarly, if children survived, but no wife, they received half the property. When the wife and children survived, each party received one third. The church hoped that the remaining fraction would go to the church as a reward for praying for the deceased's soul. It taught that dying without a will was sinful. Adults were to confess their sins at least yearly to their parish priest, which confession would be confidential.
Ecclesiastical offenses included fornication, adultery, incest, and bigamy, for which the punishment was usually whipping or a money payment. Heresy and sorcery were so infrequent that there was no machinery aptly suited for their suppression.
Henry de Bracton, a royal justice and the last great ecclesiastical attorney, wrote an unfinished treatise: A Tract on the Laws and Customs of England, systematizing and organizing the law of the court rolls with definitions and general concepts and describing court practice and procedure. It was influenced by his knowledge of Roman legal concepts, such as res judicata, and by his own opinions, such as that the law should go from precedent to precedent. He also argued that the will and intent to injure was the essence of murder, so that neither an infant nor a madman should be held liable for such and that degrees of punishment should vary with the level of moral guilt in a killing. He thought the deodand to be unreasonable.
Bracton defines the requirements of a valid and effective gift, still applicable in 2000, as: "It must be complete and absolute, free and uncoerced, extorted neither by fear nor through force. Let money or service play no part, lest it fall into the category of purchase and sale, for if money is involved there will then be a sale, and if service, the remuneration for it. If a gift is to be valid the donor must be of full age, for if a minor makes a gift it will be ineffective since (if he so wishes) it shall be returned to him in its entirety when he reaches full age. Also let the donor hold in his own name and not another's, otherwise his gift may be revoked. And let him, at the least, be of sound mind and good memory, though an invalid, ill and on his death bed, for a gift make under such conditions will be good if all the other [requirements] of a valid gift are met. For no one, provided he is of good memory, ought to be kept from the administration or disposition of his own property when affected by infirmity, since it is only then that he must make provision for his family, his household and relations, given stipends and settle his bequests; otherwise such persons might suffer damage without fault. But since charters are sometimes fraudulently drawn and gifts falsely taken to be made when they are not, recourse must therefore be had to the country and the neighborhood so that the truth may be declared."
In Bracton's view, a villein could buy his own freedom and the child of a mixed marriage was free unless he was born in the tenement of his villein parent.
Judicial Procedure
The Royal Court spawned several courts with different specialties and became more like departments of state than offices of the King's household. The justices were career civil servants knowledgeable in the civil and canon law. The Court of the King's Bench (a marble slab in Westminster upon which the throne was placed) traveled with the king and primarily heard criminal cases and pleas of the Crown. Any use of force, however trivial, was interpreted as breach of the royal peace and could be brought before the King's Bench. Its records were the coram rege rolls. The Court of Common Pleas primarily heard civil cases brought by one subject against another. Pursuant to the Magna Carta, it sat only at one place, the Great Hall in Westminster. It had concurrent jurisdiction with the King's Bench over trespass cases. Its records were the de banco rolls. The Court of the Exchequer with its subsidiary department of the Treasury was in almost permanent session at Westminster, primarily collecting the Crown's revenue and enforcing the Crown's rights. A department of the Exchequer watched over the affairs of the Jews. There was no sharp line demarking the jurisdictions of these courts. No pleas could be brought against the king; rather a petition was addressed to him, which he would answer by an executive writ.
Appeals from these courts could be made to the king and/or his small council. In 1234, the justiciar as the principal royal executive officer and chief presiding officer over the Royal Court ended. In 1268, a chief justiciar was appointed to hold pleas before the king. About the same time the presiding justice of the Court of Common Pleas also came to be styled chief justice. Henceforth, a justiciar was a royal officer who dealt only with judicial work. The justiciars were no longer statesmen or politicians, but rather men learned in the law.
Membership in or attendance at the great council or parliament no longer rested upon feudal tenure, but upon a writ of summons which was, to a degree, dependent on the royal will.