Statutes of Riot in the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Among liveries, maintenances, arbitrations and forcible entries, is seemingly one but not important factor the bastard feudalism. Because the relative scarcity the statutes regulating riots, because the accepted understanding that they were some social-wide happenings by common people like Peasants' Revolts and Jack Cade's Rebellions, very few historians have paid their attentions to riots.Actually, riots were not rare in England in the later middle ages. Riots were normal and not necessarily serious ingrediants the dayly life gentry, especialy those who were more interested in their property rights than their participation in political affairs. This is not easy to understand from the surface one or two statutes of riot. However, once they find out the inner connections between the statutes riot and each set the statutes liveries, maintenances, forcible entries, and, indeed, novel disseisin, and also the connections among themselves, men can easily be persuaded the real position and meanings riots in the late medieval society.In this essay, I have set the main focus upon the inner connections among those seemingly separate and independent statutes. Some attention and labor was put, in course to find out those connections, on the contents each statute and the development each set statutes.