Chapter 14 - CONTROLLING THE USE OF DISTRAINT

Summary

Several chapters of the Statute of Marlborough were concerned with controlling the use of distraint. We have already looked in detail at the enforcement of chapter 9, whose main concern was with the use of distraint to enforce the performance of suit of court, and which attempted to control it by enacting special rules about when lords were entitled to use distraint for this purpose and by giving tenants a special statutory action to enforce those rules. We have also looked at how in the early fourteenth century those same special rules from chapter 9 came to be applicable also in the common law action of replevin when the tenant was contesting his lord's use of distraint, though only if the tenant wanted to invoke them, and at how the statutory provisions included in the same chapter, restricting lords in the services they could claim from tenants whose charter specified the performance of a fixed service ‘for all service’, also came around the same time to be enforced through the same action and again in connexion with the lord's use of distraint to enforce the performance of additional services. This chapter will look at the enforcement of the various other chapters of the same Statute which were also concerned with the use and possible abuse of the right of distraint.