Courts of Chivalry and Admiralty in Late Medieval Europe ed. by Anthony Musson, and Nigel Ramsay (review)

What law could be enforced in medieval Europe when state confronted state in public war? Whose courts could deliver judgement acceptable to all? The royal courts might check private war but what power did they have to judge in wars with other states? Was the law of arms more than a system of customary law mainly for the rights and obligations of individual soldiers and not the legal responsibility of the state? These questions have been re-examined recently in different projects that have opened up difficult aspects of the enforcement of law between nations that led eventually to international law.

The contributors to this book are concerned with various aspects of a jurisdiction that stretched beyond the single state and implied a notional agreed common code of law. This by the fourteenth century was known as the Law of Arms and was taken to be binding on soldiers whichever side they were on. The papers included examine some of the controversial issues that arose from the complexity of the possible jurisdictions that existed at the time and the common military culture they sought to enforce. The monarch may have been the fount of honour, but all the authors remind us of the social structure that established the position of the aristocracy and made critical their claims to dominant status. Challenges to an individual's right to arms were heard in the monarch's courts, tested by trial by combat, and those who failed were punished by the downgrading of their arms.

The papers also remind us that heraldry was no side issue but vital in political and financial rights and also fundamental to social and cultural position. Julian Luxford, in examining the many different objects on which an individual's arms might be inscribed, reveals how essential heraldry was to identity. Also critical was the formal arming for a duel, as Ralph Moffat's paper demonstrates. Richard Barber re-examines the timing whereby the heralds obtained a formal status and authority in England and Laurent Hablot considers similar aspects in French armorial disputes.

It has long been recognized that the detailed testimony of witnesses could be exploited to inform us of the forgotten life stories of lesser military men. Andrew Ayton's investigation of the history of Nicholas Sabraham illuminates the typical development of such a career and what it can tell us about the culture of a society in which standing armies were a rarity. Philip Morgan takes the familiar story of the Scrope–Grosvenor controversy and looks at it from a different angle, while Bernard Schnerb reflects on the rather different story of the role of the constables and marshals of France. The most significant papers are probably those by Thomas Heeboll-Holm and Anne Sutton, who are investigating English Admiralty jurisdiction, because a claim to sovereignty over the sea was a legal novelty and hard to justify. Which monarch first had the audacity to claim it? Anne Sutton also establishes a new aspect of Richard III's career by examining the exploitation of his control of social status through his joint position as both admiral and constable of England.

These authors are shedding renewed light on ideas that were explored a generation ago by Frederick Cheyette and Pierre Chaplais, about the ways in which new claims were asserted. Their modified conclusions are likely to be controversial as they bring to the fore in their analysis considerations of political manoeuvring. For example, the wars England was involved in during the fourteenth century are analysed to account for the chronology of the appearance of an English Admiralty court. Maritime law relating to issues such as piracy or wreck and other events at sea had been heard in a variety of courts before the Admiralty courts appeared, but at this time the admirals began to assert authority in the...