ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the impact of laws and judicial systems on the norms and practice of violence not on the continent, but rather in England. The boundaries between the Church and State were still fluid in Carolingian period that law students found it useful to study both Roman and canon law. This royal law, and the judicial institutions that went with it, reflected familiar neo-Carolingian impulses on the part of kings to turn their duty to maintain order on Gods behalf into wide-ranging claims to regulate violence. The chapter examines that what happened in England when royal initiatives ran into the far older norms of violence followed by most of the English population. The scholarship enables to see three threads cross, namely royal ambitions, the legal culture of the continental law schools, and the ancient norms of personal violence. The relationship between royal authority and the local practice of violence began to change after the Norman conquest of England.
