Stalbridge Weston in the Courts
Nobody wrote down the everyday life of Stalbridge Weston; what survives alongside manorial court rolls and wills is its quarrels. When neighbours fell out — over an acre of wasteThe lord's waste referred to uncultivated land within a manor not held by tenants. These were typically open, unimproved lands... In full., a lost copyholdA form of land tenure where the tenant held land 'by copy of court roll'. The manorial court roll recorded... In full., a felled tree — the courts took evidence. Villagers who appear nowhere else in the record were sworn and questioned, and the clerks wrote down their names, ages and occupations, along with their memories of how things had always been done.
The pages below retell the manor’s lawsuits from the surviving documents: bills, answers and depositions, transcribed from the originals at The National Archives and the Somerset Heritage Centre. Each page tells the story first, then sets out the people and places it names. One warning before you start: we rarely know who won. The courts kept the arguments; most of the verdicts are lost. But we can, in some cases, deduce the result from what happened afterwards.
A word on the courts themselves. Star ChamberThe royal court at Westminster which punished riots, frauds, perjury and public disorder. It could not decide who owned land,... In full. was the royal court at Westminster that punished riots, frauds and public disorder. It could not decide who owned land, which is why so many of its cases, including ours, are property disputes dressed up as riots. ChanceryChancery was the Lord Chancellor's court, which administered 'equity': fairness as a body of law, applied where the strict rules... In full. was the court of ‘equity’ — fairness — for wrongs the common law could not reach, such as a title you could not prove because the one document that mattered was in someone else’s chest. And under both sat the manor courtThe court of the manor itself, where copyhold land changed hands, tenants were admitted and amerced, and the custom of... In full. itself, where Weston’s land actually changed hands, copyThe copy of an entry of a court roll recording the admission of a tenant to copyhold property. The copy... In full. by copy.
A note on wording. On every case page, words inside quotation marks are the documents’ own, exactly as transcribed. Where the prose sounds odd without them — men are demanded at doors, workmen are saved harmless — the idiom is still the documents’: we have kept their wording rather than translate it, and reserved quotation marks for exact phrases.
The cases so Far
The Riot on the Greene (1606–1607) — Attorney General v Weston, at the relation of Charles Brooke; Star Chamber. An acre of shared waste, an unfinished cottage, one lopped tree and two proud men.
A Very Quiet Wedding (c.1553–1574) — Dibbyn v Wattes; Chancery. A widow’s remarriage that four witnesses would not admit to, a copyhold title lost ‘in bag, box or chest’, and a £100 ending.