Kinsmen of a minor heir who have custody of his land held in socage shall make no waste, sale, nor destruction of the inheritance and shall answer to the heir when he comes of age for the issues of the land, except for the reasonable costs of these guardians.
No lord may distrain any of his tenants. No one may drive animals taken by distraint out of the shire where they have been taken.
"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".
Henry de Bracton, a royal judge and the last great ecclesiastical lawyer, 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 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 them 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 split up into several courts with different specialties and became more like departments of state than offices of the King's household. The judges were career civil servants knowledgeable in the civil and canon law. The Court of Common Pleas heard civil cases brought by one subject against another. Pursuant to the Magna Carta, it sat only at one place, Westminster Hall in London. 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, collecting the Crown's revenue and enforcing the Crown's rights. The Court of the King's Bench (a marble slab in Westminster upon which the throne was placed) traveled with the King and heard criminal cases and pleas of the Crown. Its records were the coram rege rolls. The title of the Chief Justiciar of England changed to the Chief Justice of England.
Appeals from these courts could be made to the King and his council.
Crown pleas included issues of the King's property, fines due to him, murder (a body found with no witnesses to a killing), homicide (a killing for which there were witnesses), rape, wounding, mayhem, consorting, larceny, robbery, burglary, arson, poaching, unjust imprisonment, selling cloth by non-standard widths, selling wine by non-standard weights.