Outlawry, Governance, and Law in Medieval England by Melissa Sartore (review)

Melissa Sartore argues that “an examination of outlawry, its variations, and relationship with the increased use of imprisonment makes clear that the social system was changing from one of exclusion to one based on the confinement of offenders who were brought into a closer relationship with the law by a strengthened governmental authority” (p. 14). She sets out to make this argument in a series of chapters dealing with outlawry in Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman England and in the reigns of Henry II, Richard I to early Henry III, Henry III (after 1223), and Edward I. Over the course of these chapters she demonstrates a shift from outlawry as a primarily local response to crime and disorder to a more bureaucratic process, largely driven from the centre and balanced against the options provided by imprisonment as an emerging and flexible tool that could be used either to enforce other methods of punishment, such as fines, or as a form of punishment in itself. Framing the shift as a move from exclusion to incarceration is a neat formulation, but it sits uneasily with Sartore’s obvious desire to demonstrate that outlawry remained a vibrant and useful tool throughout the medieval period.

At the opening of the book Sartore defines outlawry as the action of declaring someone to be outside the protection of the law; exile or banishment as enforced removal from the land according to an edict or sentence; and abjuration as an oath to leave a town or country forever. She does not generally retain any clear distinction between the terms throughout the book, however, which causes a fair amount of confusion, as she discusses both political exiles and criminals interchangeably and without much consideration for the contexts within which they might have been excluded and the implications of those contexts for understanding the social and legal functions of outlawry. At the end of chapter two she explains that “Kings drove out adversaries; powerful lords removed ‘unjust’ rulers; nobles cast out men who offended them; kinsmen drove members of rival families into exile; and fugitive suspects and escaped prisoners were outlawed” (p. 39) and while the chapter has given examples of all those events, more or less, it has not provided any discussion of key differences between them. This fuzziness continues into the next chapters where she argues that the Normans used political exile as a tool of ducal power, and imprisonment to influence men and display authority. Henry II, on the other hand, recognized that imprisonment was a more effective tool for political control, since exiles could simply plot opposition overseas. Though Sartore provides numerous examples of men who were banished and men who were imprisoned, there is little discussion of why different opponents were treated differently. She notes that there is little information for how outlawry might have functioned at the lower social levels in this period, but suggests that the Norman kings probably carried on much as their Saxon predecessors might have done.

Chapter four focuses primarily on the Becket controversy, on the assizes of Clarendon and Northampton and on Glanville. In bringing control over a disobedient bishop and criminous clerks into the picture, Sartore muddies the waters still further, without providing any substantive discussion of how abjuration and sanctuary operated as forms of exclusion, and how they interacted with outlawry and exile. Most of the discussion focuses on the provisions of Clarendon and Northampton, along with Glanville, and while this does point to the growth of royal interest in criminal law and its management, it does little to elucidate how these processes actually worked in the period.

This trajectory continues into the later chapters, where Sartore continues to discuss examples of changes in outlawry procedure, and changes in the use of imprisonment, abjuration and exile, but without making clear distinctions, and without much consideration of their uses or of the interconnections between them. There is little here that will be new to anyone with a working knowledge...