ABSTRACT
The relationship between lordship and justice has a major bearing on any assessment of late Anglo-Saxon government and its contribution to the making of English law. Indeed, the matter has determined how scholars have perceived the whole trajectory of legal development in the early English kingdom. Maitland remains an especially important, because deeply influential, case in point. In Domesday Book and Beyond, he argued that the attempt by pre-Conquest kings to build coherent judicial institutions ended with ‘stupendous failure’, principally because lordship was allowed to undermine all they had achieved. His argument turned on his interpretation of two forms of pre-Conquest lordship, soke and commendation. As to the former, his contention was that, when late Anglo-Saxon kings made grants of sake and soke to lords, they were conceding the right to hold private courts; and since charters and Domesday Book contain evidence of many such grants, he concluded that there was ‘plenty of seignorial justice in England’ before the Conquest. What is more, ‘the greatest of Anglo-Saxon lords had enjoyed high and wide justiciary rights’; indeed, ‘the well endowed immunist of St Edward’s day had jurisdiction as high as that which any palatine earl of after ages had’. In these respects, Maitland argued, English law was ‘taking the shape that French law took’. The consequences of this were profound: ‘Seignorial justice is a deep-seated cause of many effects, a principle which when once introduced is capable of transfiguring a nation’. As to the latter, Maitland’s contention was that that the bonds of personal lordship − ‘mere commendation’ − were too weak to bear the weight placed upon them in judicial contexts. It was not until the late twelfth century that these deficiencies were made good: the Norman Conquest served to make the bonds of lordship robust enough to withstand and facilitate legal innovation and change, but it took ‘the reconstruction of criminal justice in Henry II’s time’ to assert royal authority sufficiently to ‘reduce the immunist’s powers’.1
