Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170-1300

The Mediæval Journal, 1.2 (2011), pp. 43-79

This essay firstly argues that the term ‘accountability’ is not always helpfully applied in historical and other analyses, despite its ubiquity and importance. Its analytical importance is illustrated through examination of a letter of Pope Benedict XVI. Next this analysis is extended through a discussion of accountability’s problematic standing in relation to twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italian podestà and their liability to the accountability of sindacatio. A more nuanced distinction between exacted accountability and granted responsibility is needed, and is apparent in this historical context. Finally, the previous arguments are used to develop a more general interpretative model of how to think about accountability in historical and other analyses.

Journal of Medieval History, 2020

The article discusses the role of the population in shifting the accountability of officials from the private to the public sphere in the late medieval period, when these procedures proliferated across Europe. It focuses on Castile in a European perspective as an example of two revealing developments: first, the role of urban representatives in legislation that ensured royal officials would account at the end of their term of office in the localities despite the reticence of the Crown. Second, it points to flexibility in the use of this procedure, known as residencia and based on sindacato, employed at the discretion of communities and not exclusively at that of the elites. The article advocates reflection on the importance of the population at large generally in enforcing procedures that placed accountability in the hands of the public, and the adoption of a 'bottom up' approach to this topic.

Hiérarchie des pouvoirs, délégation de pouvoir et responsabilité des administrateurs dans l'Antiquité et au Moyen Âge, ed. Agnès Bérenger, Frédérique Lachaud, Centre de Recherche Universitaire Lorrain d'Histoire, Université de Lorraine - Site de Metz, 46 (Metz, 2012), pp. 201-230

Challenges to Authority and the Recognition of Rights

The common law defies periodization. Our modern law was formed in the wake of the Common Law Procedure Acts 1852-60 and the Judicature Acts 1873-75, but we can hardly work within the common law without constant glances back to earlier periods that deployed very different actions, procedures, and organizing doctrines. Indeed, judges to this day can still cite ancient doctrine as if the ideas of lawyers of distant times have an entirely live presence in their own later debates. With such constant intellectual time travel, the past of our law is not even past. 1 Magna Carta is the ne plus ultra of such juristic timelessness. It is mainly in the arena of constitutional law that the 1215 statute has operated as a live authority to be cited in court; 2 but Magna Carta also has an interesting post-history as a progenitor of fiduciary principles in private law. Magna Carta gave the first legislative restatement of the nascent legal controls of stewardship by guardians and bailiffs, which led in turn to the evolution of modern doctrines for the control of accountable parties such as agents, bailees, executors, guardians, trustees, and directors. By reviewing the operation of Magna Carta in this area we may better be able to understand why accountability has mattered across our legal history, and thereby better grasp the problems and uncertainties faced by our law today. At the time of Magna Carta the line between public and private accountability was difficult or impossible to draw within a feudal system merging jurisdictions with estates. 3 However, continuity across the field or public and private accountability may be found in the idea of due process-that decision-makers

Abstract: This article considers a number of texts which historians of medieval England have had difficulty in categorising: poems which are sometimes referred to as ‘satirical’, and which criticize royal officeholders, often, in practice, the gentry and urban elites. To better understand the social function of these texts, this article considers the work of French historians on ‘reform’, arguing that the English poems ‘of social contestation’ would be better understood from a similar point of view. They are not simply for entertainment; they are rather part of a ‘confessional’ process whereby moralists attempted to discipline local elites as the judicial and fiscal powers of the latter expanded in the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Résumé : Cet article considère un ensemble de textes que les historiens anglais ont eu du mal à comprendre : des textes dits « satirique » qui critiquent la classe des officiers (c’est-à-dire la petite noblesse des comtés et les élites urbaines) mais qui ont été vraisemblablement écrits, recopiés et lus par cette même classe. Pour expliquer leur fonction, cet article puisent dans les travaux des historiens français sur la « réforme », arguant que les textes anglais dits « de contestation sociale » peuvent être compris dans une optique semblable. Ils ne sont pas de simples œuvres distrayantes ; ils font plutôt partie d’un processus « confessionnel » par lequel les moralistes essayaient de discipliner les élites locales lors de l’expansion des pouvoirs judiciaires et fiscaux de ces derniers entre le XIIIe et le XIVe siècle.

2009

This dissertation examines how some Middle English writers bring the conventions of estates literature together with an emerging and evolving “literature of sovereignty” and thereby identify the individual as both a political subject and a target of regulatory authority. In these texts, the estate becomes a metonymy for rather than a definition of one's obligations to the polity as a whole. For the authors considered, estates do no order the polity. Instead, order results from self-governance in accordance with a generalized Christian morality as expressed in the law of the realm, self- governance of the kind counseled in earlier Latin productions such as the Secretum Secretorum, Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum and Henry Bracton's De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae. Ultimately, by removing the estate as a filter between self and realm, Middle English authors begin a radical transformation of the corporate metaphor. In the traditional medieval conception of the body politic, no single body marked as it is by its affiliation with a particular estate, can adequately represent the political whole; it can only represent that part of which it is itself a part, the head, heart, hands, etc. In a body politic unblemished by functional partitions, individual bodies become much more fungible, and the individual can more readily act as a representative of the whole. By enabling a new metaphorical relationship between the individual and society, medieval authors enabled new ways of thinking about political participation and the relationship between the governors and the governed.

The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 1988

Examines the development of fiscal accounting and emergence of central records. Discusses the role of such recordkeeping and what it reveals about the form of royal government in the thirteenth-century Scottish kingdom. In: Louise Wilkinson and David Crook (ed.), The Growth of Royal Government under Henry III (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015).

Early Medieval Europe, 2008

2005