Royal Judges Research Articles

Monarquía y ciudades de realengo en Castilla. Siglos XII-XV

Étude sur les rapports entre le pouvoir royal et ceux des villes qui relevaient directement de la couronne (realengo) à travers quatre siècles (XIIe-XVe) depuis l'époque de la reconquista, en soulignant les grandes réformes de la période 1250-1350: le renforcement du pouvoir des cheva­liers urbains, la naissance des lignages, des partis (bandos) et des assem­blées locales restreintes (regimientos), la préférence des lois royales sur les règlements communales et la présence en ville d'agents de la couronne (alcaldes del rey, corregidores). La deuxième partie de l'étude traite des rapports politiques entre les villes, la royauté et les grands nobles pour remarquer leur influence sur les structures et sur le fonctionnement du gou­vernement des villes pendant l'époque Trastamara (1369-1474) et au cours du règne des Reyes Católicos (1475-1515) qui ont réussi à renforcer dura­blement l'autorité de la couronne sur le modele de pouvoir municipal qui s'était développé au cours du has Mayen Age.

"On the life and continence of judges": the production and transmission of imperial legislation in late Ottonian Italy

This article focuses on a decree prohibiting imperial or royal judges from marrying that was copied around the year 1000 into a ninth-century manuscript of canon law now in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence (Edili 82). The article sets the decree in the context of Ottonian legislation in Italy, and of early medieval legislation more generally, and provides a detailed investigation of the manuscript’s contents and likely provenance. It argues that the decree should be read as new evidence for the aspiration of the late Ottonian court’s clerical elites to integrate increasingly autonomous Italian legal professionals into the imperial reforming programme. A critical edition of the decree is provided as an appendix.

Zsigmond II Druget (? -1684) – sketches from the unknown life path

On the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the Drugeth (of Italian origin) family’s arrival to Northeastern Hungary (in our case, to the Ung Сounty), a significant growth of interest is observed in the family as a whole as well as in some of its members who dominated the region for almost three centuries. This interest is not accidental, since the Drugeth family except the state-level dignitaries (palatines, royal judges, Transylvanian governors, commanders), enriched the history of the Hungarian kingdom with writers, poets, school founders, robber knights, and forgers. However, history often plays a strange game with its participants, since, while memories of some individuals are kept unchanged for dozens of succeeding generations, but for some others we have to assemble the "historical mosaic" depicting heroes of that time, practically from small fragments. In almost every scholarly work on the history of Northeastern Hungary (present-day Zakarpattia), special attention is paid to representatives of the Drugeth family, but biographical data of its individual members are rare. Scientific researches that began during the last decade at the Uzhhorod National University gave a serious “impetus for the intensification of “studies concerning the Drugeths” in the Ukrainian historiography”. The scientific work covers the life path and activity of a little-known representative of the Northeastern Hungarian nobility, statesman and writer Zsigmond Drugeth (? –1684). He has been paid little attention by the Hungarian historical science paid, although during his 27 years long life he graduated from university, participated in major historical events, and published 2 books. Unfortunately, Zsigmond Drugeth became a “victim” of the historical science. Science accepted the “mistake” of one of the historians as a historical fact, therefore the life path of Zsigmond Drugeth in most publications ends with a shameful execution on the scaffold. The aim of our scientific work is to show the real person who has left a powerful but still unknown mark in the history of Northeastern Hungary based on available resources.

The Role of Ulama in the Application of Islamic Syariah in Aceh: A Study of Aceh Ulama Council’s Fatwa on Apostasies and Heresies

This article examines the role of ulama in the implementation of Sharia in Aceh by focusing on the study of their fatwa concerning apostasies and heresy. Since the time of the Aceh Sultanate, the role of the ulama has been prominent as the royal judges who applied sharia due to the status Aceh as the region that embraces Sunni Islam as the official schools of jurisprudence and theology. This situation continues in the period of independence and it has legally been further strengthened in the post-Soeharto regime (reformation era) by the special autonomy status granted to Aceh that includes the right to implement sharia in full. Based on the special autonomy, the council of ulama in Aceh, known as Majelis Permusyawaratan Ulama (the Consultative Assembly of Ulama) or MPU) is officially instuted as the government partner and vested with the authority to issue religious edicts (fatwa) and give considerations regarding the problems of governance, development, community development, and Islamic economy to the government. With regards to Islamic theology, the MPU has the authority to determine the orthodoxy of a religious group by issuing fatwa. As studied, there are fourteen fatwa issued by the MPU on sects and religious movements flourished in Aceh which are deemed to be deviating from Islamic orthodoxy; those include Shiah, Millata Abraham, and Gafatar. From in-depth studies of the fatwa, this article reveals that the influential role of ulama in Aceh in the life of society and government comes from three legitimations, namely; history, legal, and social. This thus has made the society and government feel bound by the MPU fatwa on apostasies and heresies which prompt the Aceh government to ban the groups despite freedom of religion guaranteed by the constitution. This condition is theoretically appealing because, as far as the legal system of Indonesia is a concern, obeying a fatwa is a matter moral compliance instead of legal compliance. Keywords: Aceh, Islamic Sharia, Ulama Council’s Fatwa on Apostasies and Heresies

Tout Fait Maison: A Law Code Crafted by the Eighteenth Century Jewry of Metz

Abstract This inquiry examines Le Recueil des Loix, Coutumes, et Usages Observes par les Juifs de Metz. Evocative of the medieval German Sachsenspiegel, the volume’s detailed regulations supply a rich portrait of a Jewish community in Alsace-Lorraine during the turbulent final decades of the ancien regime. While France evolved during these decades from feudalism to democracy, the Jews transitioned from serfs main-mortables or royal chattels to citizenship. Ideals of the emerging French democracy were imprinted upon the Code Napoleon (1805), a distinctively anti-feudal, secular expression of French citizens’ newfound autonomy. In contrast, the Recueil originated in an act of will on the part of the Jews’ overlords. In accordance with royal orders, it was deposited in the records of the royal court at Metz in about 1742; royal judges and members of the bar consulted the Recueil in all manner of disputes involving Jewish litigants and Jewish law. The Recueil, as the handiwork of eighteenth century Alsatian Jews, was unique in engrafting Jewish law and ethics upon French law of the ancien regime.

The Ties That Bind

This article examines the question of intermarriage between Moriscos and Old Christians in early modern Spain, largely through the analysis of more than two dozen applications made by members of mixed couples who sought to return to their homes in Granada after the conclusion of the devastating War of the Alpujarras (1568–1570). It argues that royal judges tasked with deciding the fate of the applications had already begun to develop the criteria that would govern the regulations on general expulsion (1609–1614) decades later and that these criteria were linked to specific considerations arising from the medieval legal history of Iberia.

Cabildo, agentes reales y conflictos jurisdiccionales en una ciudad periférica de la Monarquía española. Mendoza, siglo XVIII

De acordo com os novos estudos sobre a vitalidade do corporativismo e a validade da cultura jurisdicional até o fim do Antigo Regime, a tensão de poderes entre juízes municipais (representantes da cidade) e juízes reais (representantes da Coroa) em um é analisada cidade periférica da Monarquia Espanhola. O estudo das instituições governamentais de Mendoza no século XVIII - quando esta cidade mudou de jurisdição da capitania chilena para o vice-reinado do Río de la Plata - tem o interesse de contribuir, desde novas perspectivas, para o conhecimento do comportamento dos as elites capitulares em suas relações com os funcionários reais e os processos pelos quais os cabildos chegaram com grande vigor na véspera da revolução.

Le tombeau de la paix. Une histoire des édits de pacification 1560–1572

Jérémie Foa’s excellent and highly readable Le tombeau de la paix is the published version of his doctoral thesis, supervised by Olivier Christin at Lumière Lyons 2. It is a study of the commissioners of the edicts of pacification, royal judges sent by the Crown into the French provinces to make peace after the civil wars of 1562–3 and 1567–70, responsible for implementing the edicts of Amboise (1563) and Saint-Germain (1570). The commissioners’ failure to achieve peace in the early wars of religion has resulted in their relative neglect, but Foa argues that the nature of their work and its results were ultimately very important in the evolution of the French royal state. Foa’s intention is to ‘follow them on the uneasy roads of the kingdom’, to listen to their discourses of pacification, to observe their acts of reconciliation and arbitration, and their attempts to impose a durable peace by finding ways for Catholics and Protestants to live together. By moving armed conflict into the judicial sphere, and through a rich use of symbolism, the commissioners attempted to move regional politics away from conflict into co-existence. Foa uses extensive primary sources, from central and regional archives. The strength of the work is its interweaving of high political context with issues and events on the ground, based on detailed local case studies. It complements the recent study of the edicts of pacification by Penny Roberts, Peace and Authority during the French Religious Wars c.1560–1600, which was published after Foa’s book went to press and so is not discussed in the work.

Corruption in the Fourteenth-Century English State

This article explores manifestations of corruption among local officeholders and royal judges who exercised authority on the king's behalf. It explores the complex and often contradictory perceptions of official malpractice among these men. The king in particular understood the danger of his representatives sullying the crown's reputation. Yet, the measures taken to combat corruption were mostly ineffective and often proved to be empty rhetoric. The discussion shows how new notions of public service and accountability clashed with older forms of social and political organization founded on lordship and hierarchy. It also suggests that it was in addressing and finally tackling corruption that the origins of a “civil service” may be found.

Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France (review)

Reviewed by: Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France Malcolm Greenshields Strange Revelations: Magic, Poison, and Sacrilege in Louis XIV’s France. By Lynn Wood Mollenauer. [Magic in History Series.] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2007. Pp. x, 213. $70.00 clothbound, ISBN 978-0-271-02915-3; $25.00 paperback, ISBN 978-0-271-02916-0.) Although the “Affair of the Poisons” is one of the most notorious scandals in French history, the fresh perspective of this historian adds much to the existing scholarship. Using court and police records, memoirs, and letters surrounding the “Affair,” Lynn Wood Mollenauer deftly and vividly reconstructs a world whose focal point was Louis XIV. Most interestingly, however, this world included not merely the glittering public society of the royal court but also a powerful, though less visible, social network that extended from some relatively humble and rather shady precincts and citizens of Paris to the bedchamber and the body of the king himself. The author’s investigation of this latter “shadow hierarchy” is among the most valuable of her contributions to our understanding of the mentality and power relations characterizing court society and the populace that served it. The case will probably be forever shrouded in mystery, partly because the king destroyed some of the evidence concerning his courtiers and mistress as well as silenced the most dangerous witnesses. Moreover, the judges of his specially commissioned court, the Chambre de l’Arsenal, were forbidden to pursue the most damning and intimate lines of inquiry. Whether or not the king’s life was genuinely threatened by a plot to poison him—and the degree to which his official mistress, Madame de Montespan, was involved—have long been subjects of learned speculation. But this author wisely chooses to emphasize the plausibility rather than the veracity of witnesses’ depositions and suspects’ confessions, seeking “to establish the reasons why their testimony seemed believable to the French public, La Reynie [lieutenant general of the Paris police], Louis XIV’s judges, and the king himself” (p. 5). The reasons for both official and public belief in the testimonial evidence lie in the social world that Mollenauer so imaginatively re-creates. Beneath [End Page 375] the stringent politesse of Louis’s court lay a murky Parisian netherworld of poison sellers, abortionists, magicians, renegade priests, conjurers, and fortunetellers. Courtiers and others sought occult services to improve their fortunes or to thwart rivals by means of love potions, magic, the summons to demons, “amatory masses,” or, most lethally, “inheritance powders” (poisons). Although it is commonplace to credit women with a veiled power “behind the throne,” this work explores more fully the unique influence of women in the absolutist court of a heterosexual king at the height of his power. Only women could have the most intimate access to the king’s body, the center of power and the embodiment of the state and the nation. Despite this greatest of informal powers, the legal weakness of women sometimes required the use of poison in the pursuit of love, liberty, or wealth obstructed by inconvenient husbands, rivals, or coheirs. The author argues that the sophisticated public had little trouble believing in poisonous women motivated by ungoverned passions, because elite cultural scripts included the story of Medea and the even more horrifying contemporary poisonings by the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who murdered her husband and several other relatives with the connivance of her lover, and may also have tested her poisons on poor hospital inmates. Her execution in 1676 marked the beginning of the alarming discoveries of the “affair.” As for the magical means to success, Mollenauer argues that rites and potions were considered most powerful and credible to Parisians when sacred Catholic objects and ordained priests were involved. Interestingly, both religious fervor and judicial skepticism motivated the condemnation of occult practices under Louis XIV. Catholic reformers demanded the repression of popular superstition, while royal judges had long since refused to accept evidence of efficacious witchcraft and condemned the accused for their treason, fraud, sacrilege, and subversion of the moral, social, and religious order. In other words, one was allowed to believe in demons but not in the means to summon...

Legal Theory and Practice in Eleventh-Century Italy

As I understand it, Susan Reynolds's article is meant to address the longstanding habit among legal historians of equating professional approaches to the law with the emergence of a school-based study of Roman law. In the course of the twelfth century, she argues, legal practitioners developed their own kinds of expertise that, though less bookish, might have had a practical significance equal to, if not greater than, the learning produced in the schools. Although these observations seem on the mark for Europe north of the Alps, Reynolds errs, I think, in assimilating Italy to this chronological and conceptual schema. Already by the ninth and tenth centuries, there existed in northern Italy a corps of royal notaries and judges who possessed both literacy and legal expertise unparalleled elsewhere in Europe. Distinguished from other laymen by their titles, learning, and even their handwriting, the legal experts already appear to have met the criteria of professionalism generally proposed for the late twelfth century in the rest of Europe.

Oidores Letrados and the Idea of Justice, 1480-1570

This article attempts to compare the qualifications ascribed to law graduates who received appointments as oidores (royal judges) with their character and conduct as royal agents charged with the administration of the king's wishes, laws, edicts, and provisions. Because my conclusions are based on the conduct of royal judges serving in the appellate courts of Granada, Española, New Granada, Guatemala, and Mexico in the sixteenth century, this is not a definitive study. More than a thousand judges served in the New World audiencias (high courts) up to 1700. Moreover, judicial reviews (residencias), letters to the Crown, and related materials tend to stress sins of commission or omission rather than the good deeds of the royal magistrates. Sources also reflect differences between royal agents, conflict between royal agents and provincial officials, and the clash between the interests of the Crown, the church, and the colonists. Granted these limitations, enough documentation exists to observe the dichotomy between the administration of justice by magistrates, who were men of flesh and bone, and the idea of the wise and clement judge discharging the royal conscience by making it conform to natural and divine law.

The Reputation of Royal Judges Under the Angevin Kings

In twelfth and thirteenth-century England complaints that justice was being sold were common, culminating with King John's tacit admission in Magna Carta. Coupled with these complaints were charges of corruption against royal judges, or against royal aulici, curiales, or familiares, since until the middle of Richard I's reign no professional judiciary existed. Even in King John's time, familiares regis still served as judges. Yet a core of royal servants specializing in justice, “professionals” in a certain sense, had been created. Historians since Maitland have generally held a high opinion of these judges. According to Maitland, under Henry II and Richard I, “English law was administered by the ablest, the best educated men in the realm.…” F.M. Powicke wrote that the judiciary of Henry III was “probably the most stable and helpful, as it was the most intelligent, element in the State at this time.” How are we to reconcile historians' high opinion of the royal justices with their contemporaries' low opinion? Were the chroniclers simply drawing stock figures in their depictions of corrupt judges, or was their picture drawn from life?Royal officials, including judges, proved popular targets for the pens of twelfth century moralists and satirists, some of whom wrote out of personal bitterness, having failed in the contest for royal patronage and high office.2 Capable of condemning curiales in classical Latin style was John of Salisbury. He knew many of Henry II's courtiers, and he came to despise them, especially those in clerical orders.

Simon of Pattishall, Pioneer Professional Judge

The latter part of the twentieth century may not find many of us wishing to pay tribute to bureaucrats, but as Helen Cam reminded us, the civil servant “deserves more credit than he has yet had for building up and maintaining our precious tradition of law and order.” In the late twelfth century and the thirteenth century the process of “bureaucratization” first got underway in England. An early professional civil servant, one specializing in judicial activity, was Simon of Pattishall. His name surfaces in the records in 1190, and it disappears after 1216. His time of activity, then, coincides with an important period for English common law: the years between “Glanvill” and Magna Carta.Simon was one of that group of royal judges who might be termed the first “professionals,” a group that took shape by the middle years of Richard I's reign. By the time of John, about ninety men acted at various times as royal judges, either at the Bench at Westminster, with the court following the king, or as itinerant justices. Many of these had only temporary appointments, making circuits in the counties; but a core of fifteen, who concentrated on the work of the courts, can be regarded as early members of a professional judiciary. Simon of PattishalPs is perhaps the most respected name among the fifteen. He had the longest career on the bench, from 1190 until 1216. He founded a judicial dynasty, for his clerk, Martin of Pattishall, became a judge, as did his clerk, William Raleigh, who had as his clerk Henry of Bracton, author of the great treatise on English law.

Did the Zenger Case Really Matter? Freedom of the Press in Colonial New York

HE persistent image of colonial America as a society which cherT ished freedom of expression is a sentimental hallucination that ignores history. The evidence provides little comfort for the notion that the colonies hospitably received advocates of obnoxious or detestable ideas on matters that counted. Nor is there reason to believe that rambunctious unorthodoxies suffered only from Puritan bigots and tyrannous royal judges. The American people and their representatives simply did not understand that freedom of thought and expression means equal freedom for the other fellow, particularly the one with the hated ideas. To be sure, the utmost freedom often existed on the frontier. The test of free speech, however, is not the right of a man to soliloquize or shout his outrageous opinions from the top of a lonely mountain; it is, rather, his right to speak openly and with impunity among his neighbors. America may have been the scene of the most extraordinary diversity of opinion on religion, politics, and other vital subjects, but each community, especially outside the few cities, tended to be a tight little island clutching its own orthodoxy, willing to banish or extralegally to punish unwelcome dissidence. As John P. Roche says so strikingly, Colonial America was an open society dotted with closed enclaves, and one could generally settle with his co-believers in safety and comfort and exercise the right of oppression.' When vigorously expressed nonconformist opinions were suffered to exist by the community, they were likely to run afoul of the law. In colonial America, as in England, the common law of seditious libel was strung out like a chicken wire of constraint making the open discussion