Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (review)

Many years ago, the vast majority of scholars of medieval English history soundly rejected the notion that the year 1066 marked a watershed. For a good part of the twentieth century, the main historiographical theme of works that examined the social, political, and economic conditions of the eleventh- and twelfth-century stressed continuity rather than change and accommodation rather than disjuncture. The holdouts were legal scholars, many of whom, until relatively recently, persisted in drawing a firm line between the customs and practices of the Anglo-Saxon age on the one hand and the growth of a central, royally controlled common law on the other. Ongoing fascination with the sweeping legal reforms initiated by Henry II, moreover, meant that for many years after Stenton's death, the century between 1066 and 1166 went largely unexplored.¹ In this densely but strongly written work, Hyams remedies this lacuna, and more particularly tries to establish a strong link between what he calls the "feuding culture" of the Anglo-Saxon and post- Conquest periods. The result is a masterful treatment of a complex subject, handled, as Hyams' readers have come to expect, with verve, wit, and a high degree of expertise.

Hyams argues reasonably that the conditions at the root of the feuds of the Anglo-Saxon age did not disappear after 1066. In both periods, quarrels over land or economic resources and violence done to persons were capable of generating deep and abiding rancor. One of the chief aims of dispute resolution was the reconciliation of conflicting parties. As Hyams notes in his introduction, by the thirteenth century, the common law offered plaintiffs two distinct remedies for wrong in the appeal of felony and the civil action of trespass. But already by the eleventh, he posits, the Old English state "contained almost all the elements of the later Angevin system for the maintenance of order." What was missing, and what he explores fully in the body of his book, is the development of "the crucial distinction between crime and tort that has always seemed intrinsic to the common-law solution" (108).

Hyams' quest to understand the continuing importance of the feud, its place in medieval England, and the ways in which rancor and reconciliation were transformed after 1066 places his work firmly in the context of an extensive body of literature devoted to exploring the origins of the common law, to which he himself has contributed a long list of article-length studies. But this book is different. Although he bases his arguments on a close reading of extant rolls and reports, as do others, Hyams approaches the genesis of the appeal of felony and the civil action of trespass from the point of view of the cultural historian. Some of his conclusions reiterate the findings of others, but much of what he offers is wholly novel, exciting, challenging, and, without a doubt, provocative. There are some curious lapses in his treatment of the feud and the vengeance mentality that fueled it, not least of which is an inadequate appreciation of the considerable work on this topic by Scottish historians, notably Wormald and Brown, both of whom have long argued for the survival of the feud within common-law Scotland.² But more than that of most other historians, Hyams' approach to the reforms initiated by the Angevin kings casts valuable new light on the ways in which the early common law absorbed, then reflected, cultural norms once believed to have vanished in the aftermath of the Conquest.