ABSTRACT
The latter half of the twelfth century was a period of significant legal change in England. Most notably, a number of legal procedures were introduced concerning claims to land. These brought disputes before royal justices, and laid the foundations of the English common law. All of the new actions used a form of jury procedure as their mode of proof. This was the ‘recognition’ – twelve men of the neighbourhood were selected as recognitors and would give sworn testimony based on their personal knowledge of the facts upon which the case turned. The new actions were also designed with efficiency in mind, and the procedures leading up to the recognition were intended to ensure that judgment could be reached with no unnecessary delays. This paper examines the extent to which, in practice, the choice of the recognition as a mode of proof undermined this aim. In using the evidence from the earliest surviving plea rolls of the royal courts (from 1194 to 1209), it argues that, on many occasions, postponements caused by the unauthorised absence of recognitors from court seriously affected the efficiency of the legal process. The local visitations of itinerant justices were not affected too greatly by such absences. However, actions heard at the Bench at Westminster, or before the king himself, often suffered significant delays due to the defaults of the recognitors.
