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영어

The status of villein in medieval England merits study for its importance as one factor in a man's standing within his community. This paper seeks to expound and explain the procedure of 'suit of kin', which was the main common law method to establish in court whether a man or woman was free or villein. A party of litigants produced suit of kin by bringing into court relatives of those alleged to be villeins. The relatives then acknowledged their own legal status. Since all legal status was hereditary, and the alleged villein's status, therefore, the same as that of his family, the court could then declare whether he was free or villein. In principal, the procedure was quite simple. Its special interest, however, lies in its archaic nature which is illuminated by the details of how it worked. Suit of kin recalls a time before the birth of the common law when law in England was much more continental in flavor than was the case in the thirteenth century and thereafter. The assumption behind the procedure, therefore, required a degree of stability in family and village life which had demonstrably disappeared by the time common law records permit its study. Above all, the families of those alleged to be villeins were seldom without at least some undoubtedly free members. English lawyers never successfully solved the puzzles posed by those mixed marriages to make actions about status a practical proposition for the lord seeking to enforce his rights over his serfs. Their efforts to deal with mixed marriages illustrate the interplay between law and society in thirteenth-century legal innovation. In this paper, first, the suit of kin will be set in its European context, and the details of its working will then be examined in order to discover what kind of procedure it was. Secondly, this paper will examine the rules that the lawyers, Bracton in particular, adopted in order to deal with mixed marriages, and we shall then be able to see what general lessons emerge from study of this rather unusual procedure.