Quo Warranto

The king -- Edward I -- was on a tear. His father died while he was on crusade. When Edward got back he was ready to shape things up -- especially his lands and liberties. It took longer to get things going than anticipated, but they settled on a procedure.

They called it Quo Warranto: by what warrant do you . . ? The king's men came to town and asked the question. The defendant answered. And the jury said it was like this or that. Edward I put the country through it between 1279 and 1294 (Sutherland, 1963) with Yorkshire being visited in 1279 to 1281 and again in 1293 and 1294 (English, 1996). William de Boynton served on four juries in Yorkshire between 1279 and 1281.

Even by the late thirteenth century they had legal principles that precluded hauling someone into court without notice and without a specific indictment. But quo warranto worked by sending justices into the county and announcing that anyone with a franchise from the king must present himself with the justification for the franchise. That seemed to go against the established principle. However, if the king's lawyers had had to investigate every case of franchise to produce a specific indictment quo warranto would never have gotten off the ground. The answer was established in court:

What was the king chasing? They were called liberties or franchises; the words seem to be used interchangably. The contemporary use of 'franchise' is closer to what they had in mind than is 'liberty.' It was the right to do something -- that often made money for the doer. Think of it as the medieval equivalent of Wendy's hamburgers.

In one of the cases for which William served as juror free warren was the principal franchise at issue [A Boynton Story: Let's Eat]. If you had free warren you could hunt small animals on the land and you could exclude others from hunting.

In a more substantial case the king's men asked Robert de Ros about his franchises. The de Ros family was one of the major land holders in Yorkshire at that time. This was a second case in which William served as juror.

Gallows was the right to hang criminals -- in which there probably was not much money. The assize of bread and ale were regulations for quantity and quality of bread and ale. Robert de Ros claimed the franchise to enforce the law and collect the fines when the law was broken.

The role of the jury was to know the answer to the question and to assess whether the defendent spoke truly or not. In the de Ros case the jury said he spoke truly in giving his justification for holding the franchises.

With liberties: if you don't use it, you lose it. According to Sutherland most of the instances of the king retrieving a franchise was when it was not being exercised rather than when there was inadequate justification for having it in the first place. Instead of 'ownership' of a franchise they had 'seisin' of the franchise. One definition: feudal possession; the exercise and enjoyment of rights deriving from possession of . . . You can possess, in this sense, land as well as liberties or franchises. Notice that it is "exercise" as well as enjoyment. The king gave it to you to use; if you did not use it, you lost it.

Sutherland produced a rather long list of liberties that belonged to the king.

amerciamenta hominum	amerciamenta propria
assize of bread and ale	bloodwite
chase	chattels of felons
childwite	coroners
fightwite	flemesflit
forsteal	flymenafyrmth
gallows	grithbrice
hamsocne	infangentheor
market and fair	murage
park	quittance of sheriff's turn
quittance of shires and hundreds	replevin
return of writs	sake and soke
tol and team	toll
tumbrel	utfangentheof
vee de naam	waif and stray
warren	wreck of the sea

The last of these, wreck of the sea, involved the claim that all wreckage washed ashore and not claimed by the owner of the ship belonged to the king -- unless you were given liberty to take it. In 1625, three hundred and fifty years later, the king -- Charles I -- was still claiming to have the rights to shipwrecks [documents]. Three ships were wrecked and washed ashore at Barmston. Matthew Boynton marched the sailors off to the king's jail in York, but he held onto the wreckage. Rights and liberties were argued, and those rights got intertwined with both sides [royalists versus parliamentarians] and local [the York Judge of the Admiralty] versus the king's admiralty. It is, unfortunately, a story without a conclusion. The Admiralty may have conceded to Matthew's rights, but did Buckingham? There are no documents to spell the end of the tale.

It is all the king. Le realm, c'est moi. The land was the king's and one held land from the king. Or one held land from a baron who held land from the king. The liberties were the king's as well. He might assign them to you to practice, but you were responsible to him for their practice.