Normandy
The Duchy of Normandy furnishes a key to the unity of Western civilization in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.
By the time the Normans conquered England, the Norman dukes had already established the first large- scale, centralized, territorial polity on the European continent.
Throughout the huge duchy -Âapproximately as big as all the Anglo-Saxon politics put together and several times as big as the territories ruled by the King of France -- no lord could build or maintain a castle without the duke's permission. Each lord owed military service to the duke. The duke not only had a monopoly of coinage within his realm, but a network of ducal officials, called vicomtes ("vice-counts," or "viscounts" -Â"sheriffs" in English), controlled local government, commanded local military contingents, guarded castles, collected revenues, and held court. In addition, the duke was ruler of the churches within his territory; he had power to appoint bishops and abbots and to preside over provincial synods. He was the sacral ruler, the vicar of Christ, as described in the Norman Anonymous of the early 1100s. 62The history -- and especially the legal history -- of the Duchy of Normandy, like that of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, has not been emphasized by modern historians because the duchy itself ceased to be an independent polity during the thirteenth century. In an age of nationalist historiography, those countries that eventually "didn't make it" either have been forgotten -- like Norman Sicily -- or have been treated as part of some other country's history -- in Normandy's case, that of France, which eventually conquered it, or else of England, which it had previously conquered.
Nevertheless, Norman legal institutions had an important influence on both English law and French law.
Moreover, the interaction that took place between Norman and English legal institutions and between Norman and French legal institutions testifies to the essential unity of the basic legal concepts, values, and processes of the European peoples.-459-
After settling in Normandy in 911, the Norse rulers, starting with Duke Rollo, assimilated the governmental institutions of the Franks and established themselves as first_rate administrators. Among the Frankish legal processes that the Normans adopted was the inquest, consisting of an examination of the local population, under oath, by centrally appointed officials. The questions put by the official inquisitors might require the respondents to give economic or other data, to present suspected criminals, or to state whether the charges made against suspects were true. Soon after the conquest of England, the Norman rulers introduced inquests of various kinds into English practice, the most famous being the Domesday tax census of 1086. The Normans also introduced into England their own earlier practice of sending special justices to hold local courts, and they established a new system of central agencies of finance in both polities.
In the last third of the twelfth century legal institutions were fundamentally transformed not only in England but also in Normandy. In both countries there was a maturing of the system of itinerant justices, judicial writs, presenting and adjudicating inquests, and possessory assizes. In both a division was made between royal (ducal) "high" justice and feudal and local "low" justice. In both a civil case in the royal (ducal) courts was initiated by a letter (writ) from the king's chancery. According to Charles Haskins (the leading comparatist of Norman and English law in the twelfth century), the movement was largely from Normandy to England, rather than from England to Normandy. The writ of right seems to have developed simultaneously in Normandy and England during the reign of Henry I.
However, Normandy was the source of the possessory writs of Henry II, and of the sworn inquest (petty jury) called to answer the questions contained in them. 63Haskins also attributes the origin of the English exchequer under Henry I partly to the experience of Normandy, although he is unable to state whether the English or the Norman exchequer came first. Also, Henry II introduced similar systems of judges and of bailiffs in both countries at more or less the same time. The timing was not of critical importance, however. As Haskins writes, "If the English military inquest of 1166 preceded the Norman returns of 1172, the Assize of Arms and the ordinance for the Saladin tithe were first promulgated for the king's Continental dominions. The order of these measures may have been a matter of chance, for to a man of Henry's temperament it mattered little where an experiment was first tried, but it was impossible to administer a great empire upon his system without using the experience gained in one region for the advantage of another." 64
A remarkable textbook of Norman law in Normandy, written about 1200 A.D. and called the Tres ancien coutumier de Normandie (Very Old Customary Law Manual of Normandy), describes a system of law
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remarkably similar to the law described a decade earlier in Glanvill On the Laws and Customs of England. 65 If one had been a lawyer in England in the year 1190 or 1200, one could easily have moved to Normandy to practice there, without having to acquire a great deal of new learning. Thomas Brown, who was a baron of the Sicilian exchequer for two or three decades and then a baron of the English exchequer for another two or three decades, could have moved to the exchequer of the Duchy of Normandy without encountering any great surprises; similarly, a Norman judge could have moved from the court of Palermo to that of Westminster or Caen without substantial retraining.
Chapter 7 of the Tres ancien couturnier de Normandie describes the jury to be summoned to decide disputes over seisin as a jury of twelve freemen of the vicinage unrelated to either party.
Chapter 73 gives an example of a writ of novel disseisin that is virtually identical with the writ authorized by the English Assize of Clarendon in 1166: "King or his seneschal to the sheriff of such and such place, greeting. Command H. that he reseise without delay R. of his tenement... of which he was seised at [a certain time]... of which he was later disseised wrongfully and without judgment."A few years after the writing of the Tres ancien couturnier, the Duchy of Normandy was conquered by King Philip II of France and incorporated within the French empire that he established. In the following two decades, Philip adopted some of the basic institutions of Norman law for the royal law of France, including important features of the Norman administrative and judicial system. Thus the Duchy of Normandy, by its direct influence on both England and France, played a major part in the formation of the Western legal tradition.