ABSTRACT
James Taverner of Wighton in Norfolk is not unknown to historians: indeed, his notoriety has lasted from his day to ours. His oence at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign was to forge a manorial custumal of the manor of North Elmham, for which he was sued and punished in Star Chamber. e legal points which his prosecution provoked were of sucient interest to contemporaries for Taverner’s case to be recorded in the law reports, and a brief reference to it appeared as late as 1641 in a collection of leading Star Chamber cases.1 A further aspect of his case was raised in the House of Lords as a question of privilege by Taverner’s protagonist, Henry Lord Cromwell, and it became a leading case in the denition of the privileges of a peer. Amongst more recent historians, Eric Kerridge mentioned Taverner’s case, citing the account in Sir James Dyer’s reports, but felt no need to establish either the details of the case or Taverner’s motivation.2 In fact there is no single case, but a whole succession of cases in Chancery and Star Chamber (as well as those alluded to in Common Pleas)
between Taverner and successive lords of the manor of North Elmham which ran from the mid-1560s to the rst years of the seventeenth century.
