7 - The Free Court of the Priors of Durham

Summary

In April 2000 Cynthia J. Neville published an article in History focusing on the complicated web of courts in the medieval county palatine of Durham. She listed these as the bishop's halmote court, the priory halmote court, the free court of the prior of Durham, the county court, the borough courts, and local customary courts, three prerogative courts (forest, admiralty and marshalsea), and the court of chancery. ‘All these were in addition to the courts which administered, according to Common Law principles and procedures, the law familiar to and available throughout all medieval England’. This essay examines in detail one of the threads, the free court of the priors of Durham. It seeks evidence regarding the truth of the assertion that free courts were strangled by the inability of feudal lords to require their free tenants to provide evidence on oath, as would be necessary in many actions originally heard in courts baron. It was one of the charges brought against Bishop Bek in 1303, that he was requiring free men to answer in his halmote courts as opposed to his ‘free court’. (The bishop's free court was presumably the ancestor of the Durham Court of Pleas, which survived until 1873.) Jean Scammell has argued that the bishop himself was hamstrung by an inability to use statute law in his ‘free court’, but I believe that there is adequate evidence that cases were brought in Durham after 1279 which required writs based on statute.

Between Tyne and Tees the bishops of Durham claimed during the Middle Ages to exercise palatine powers. The priors of the Benedictine priory of Durham claimed to exercise similar powers over their own tenants by virtue of a written agreement, le Convenit, reached between Bishop Richard le Poore and Prior Ralph Kerneth in 1229. During succeeding centuries the bishops tried to limit the prior's jurisdiction to matters specified in the agreement, while the priors claimed increasing jurisdiction to keep in step with changes in legal procedure. Evidence for this development may be found in various recognitions of competence granted by bishops of Durham to the priors, and in the broken series of court rolls which survive for the prior's ‘free court’.