ABSTRACT
Common fields in England had been used by freeholding tenants (owners) to graze their livestock and access water to irrigate their fields, and by copyholding tenants (renters) to grow crops for personal use in small plots. By the early seventeenth century, these common rights were under attack as landlords sought to enclose common fields with fences and deny tenants access to them. This slow but steady effort to deny rights to commoners naturally caused controversy between aristocrats and their tenants. In this case, Reverend Storre was asked to give his opinion on the matter. As heir to a wealthy lord, Francis Cartwright had a vested interest in changing common rights towards the landlords’ favour, whereas Storre, using sound legal arguments, sided with the commoners and with tradition, thus making an enemy of Cartwright and giving rise to the minister’s murder. Despite this particularly gruesome act, Cartwright’s ability to secure bail from a “corrupt” magistrate was likely because of his social rank, though the privy council did not support this decision, an example of how local and central officials did not always agree. Cartwright’s social status also permitted him the ability to flee England while his friends succeeded in securing a pardon from the king, thus perverting the course of justice. Despite testimony provided by the victim’s parishioners, fellow ministers, the town’s gentry population, and the fellows of Oxford University, Cartwright’s rank helped to ensure that, ultimately, the pardon was not overturned, which meant that Storre’s widow failed to get justice for the murder of her husband. Had Cartwright been a commoner, the situation would likely have been quite different. He could not have hidden behind social status, nor possessed any right to correct social inferiors, and probably he would not have secured bail, let alone get a royal pardon before the case even went to trial. This is an example in which the privileges of social rank and the boundaries of behaviour permitted to the wealthy and powerful impacted the efficiency and fairness of the criminal justice system.
