The Secular Jurisdiction of Monasteries in Anglo-Norman and Angevin England (review)

Beginning from the assumption that, for the century and a half after 1066, the honour courts of the greater English abbeys have been little studied, Kevin Shirley uses various of the better-known English chroniclers and the published editions of royal writs to advance a simple and generally convincing thesis. In essence, the idea that at some time in the pre-Plantagenet past the English abbots presided over honorial courts from which royal authority was entirely excluded is, as Shirley demonstrates, a myth. On the contrary, from a very early date, royal writs and access to the king's courts were solicited by the English abbots to support their authority over and against their tenants. Rather than representing the first real intrusion of royal authority into the relationship between the abbots and their secular tenantry, the new possessory assizes of Henry II's reign enjoyed a long pre-history. Their effect, gradual rather than revolutionary, and fiscal rather than authoritarian in intent, was to supply tenants with new leverage against landlords who previously had looked to the crown for support rather than rebuke. However, after a period from the 1160's to the 1220's in which the abbots faced the erosion of their liberties, the relatively unintrusive government of Henry IIIallowed a breathing space in which the ecclesiastical franchises were rebuilt and their independence and profitability buttressed against future attack. So far, so good. Shirley defends his argument, albeit somewhat repetitively, through the recital of case after case in which royal authority either was or was not invoked. In the process, he proves both his own competence in the reading of medieval legal records and his eligibility for the doctoral degree with which, one assumes, his labors were crowned. As a book rather than a thesis, however, his work has to be judged according to more stringent criteria, and here two serious faults emerge. To begin with, Shirley merely rehearses a line of argument that has been advanced with far more subtlety by previous writers, most notably, in recent years, by John Hudson. Not only does Shirley continue to cite one of his principal sources—the Abingdon Chronicle—without reference to Hudson's new edition, but he makes no use whatsoever of other recent literature. Thus Alain Boureau's interesting if controversial ideas on the monastic contribution to the development of English law go entirely unnoticed. David Bates's edition of the charters of William I is cited, but frequently confused in the footnotes with the older edition of Rufus's charters in the Anglo-Norman Regesta. The work of Emily Amt and Graeme White on the accession of Henry II, although fundamental, is apparently unknown to Shirley, as indeed are many of the more important contributions to his debates, not least the various articles by J. C. Holt and others which have called into question the reliability of the Battle Chronicle. More seriously, Shirley assumes that the majority of the business of the honour court concerned property and land law: an assumption which, although unconsciously shared by various of the modern authorities, is surely false. Long after the possessory assizes had eroded the independence of the abbatial court in some though by no means all cases involving land, the criminal jurisdiction of the liberties remained both effective and, one assumes, highly lucrative. Shirley has virtually nothing to say on criminal jurisdiction. It is nonetheless worth bearing in mind that the liberty of the bishops of Ely maintained an officer named the chief justice until 1837, and that the liberty of Peterborough, direct successor to the pre-Reformation abbatial liberty, had its own jail as late as 1877. Here as throughout, Shirley fails to...