I have two aims in producing this paper. First, I wish to contribute to the general understanding of how and why law develops and explain the evolution of some very familiar legal institutions. Second, I wish to add to our knowledge of the history of Roman law, by producing a radically different view of the development of contracts, that is, I believe, both consistent with surviving textual data and plausible with regard to human behavior.

The history of arbitration procedures and extra-judicial forms of dispute settlement in medieval England remains largely unwritten. This neglect is no doubt attributable to the precocious development of the common law, which has monopolized the attention of English legal historians and left them little time to consider alternative forms of dispute resolution. Their main preoccupation, epitomized in the work of great scholars such as Maitland, Holdsworth and Plucknett, has been to trace the evolution of legal institutions, procedures and doctrine. Consideration of arbitration has at best been regarded as peripheral to this central task.

Almost every state and territory adopted a married women's property act between 1835 and 1850. These acts generally exempted married women's property from attachment by creditors of their husbands, effecting a slight change in the battery of common-law coverture rules that gave husbands management of their wives' real property and ownership of their personal property. Alterations in the roles of women in the family, increases in education of women and growth in the importance of women's public service groups provided an environment sympathetic to initial reforms in married women's property law. In addition, economic panics and depressions affected the family economy, providing an incentive for adoption of rules exempting married women's property from the claims of their husbands' creditors.

In a well-known chapter in the book known as the Mirror of Justices, the anonymous author recounts King Alfred's drastic solution to the problem of misbehaving judges:

It is an abuse that justices and their officers who slay folk by false judgments are not destroyed like other homicides. And King Alfred in one year had forty-four judges hanged as homicides for their false judgments.

Unfortunately, as Maitland has conclusively demonstrated, we cannot rely on this passage as historical evidence of Alfred's reign. Nevertheless, the passage illustrates both a problem and a solution common in the Roman and medieval periods. The problem was judicial misconduct and corruption. The solution was to impose personal liability upon miscreant judges for their behavior.

During the middle ages the church maintained a legal system largely independent of English secular justice. Its primary functions were to enforce canon law as it directed the spiritual welfare of all Christians and to regulate the institutions and personnel of the church. Thus, church courts prosecuted sinners and adjudicated disputes between individuals in which some sacramental matter, such as an oath, marriage or testament, was at stake. In addition, canon law governed appointments, powers and duties of ecclesiastical office holders and the juridical relations among various offices.

The stategic role played by population movement, and its interaction with agrarian environment, in current theories of medieval economic development stands in sharp contrast to the relatively sparse direct evidence that can be marshalled to elucidate demographic change in medieval England. Indeed, work done to date has relied largely upon indirect indicators such as rents, prices, and wages or landscape changes associated with processess of reclamation, colonization, settlement resiting, shrinkage and desertion.