witnesses who answered questions about legal regulations in which they reported their memories of declaration ceremonies. Thanks to such documents, the picture of the declarations conveyed through the Weistümer can be scrutinized. In what follows, we must first discuss the circle of participants in manorial court assemblies. What sorts of people are concealed by the terms “peasants” and “lords”? Later sections will take up the political functions and the course of action of the declaration procedures.
“The Peasants”
Manorial courts frequently have been understood in modern research as encounters between a lord and his local peasants. Such a description of the protagonists of legal declarations seems clear at first glance, but it is actually quite abstract. Even the question of who exactly took part in the manorial court on behalf of the dependents is by no means trivial. The usual description in modern research of these participants as “peasants” does not entirely reflect the terms commonly used in late medieval documents, such as “associates of the court” (hofgenossen) or “men” (homines).
The idea that obligatory attendance resulted in something like a cross section of the entire local male population works best in the case of the manorial courts of those who held territorially defined jurisdiction rights, a group that admittedly grew during the late Middle Ages.91 But much more often, a lord who claimed primarily landlord rights presided over a manorial court. In such cases, the obligation to attend referred primarily to people who had leased lands from him and accordingly owed him yearly rent. Most contemporaneous documents expressed this situation in a picturesque phrase: the duty to appear at the manorial court was placed on those who held land from the lordship that was at least “seven foot-lengths wide and seven footlengths long” (“sieben Schuh weit und sieben Schuh breit”), as recorded in various Weistümer from the vicinity of Zürich.92 Although manorial courts were on the whole thought of as masculine domains, a few women, especially widows, could also be subject to the obligation of attendance thus defined;93 in addition, numerous male heads of household were exempt from it by the same standards, for in many places a majority of the households worked land that they did not hold directly from the lordship but rather in a secondary lease relationship from the hereditary tenants (Erblehensträger). Under such circumstances, only a relatively small portion of the resident male population was obliged to take part in the manorial court.94
In the same way, the circle of participants in the manorial court of a landlord could extend far beyond the local population. The Weistum for the Aargau village of Holderbank, for example, names the participants in a declaration ceremony of 1470 and mentions their places of residence. They came from villages in the vicinity, including Niederlenz, Möriken, and Hendschiken, and from the neighboring town of Lenzburg, but apparently none of the individuals listed by name was a resident of Holderbank itself.95 Especially in areas that were close to cities, a majority of hereditary tenants could consist of urban citizens who used the legal form of a peasant lease to invest capital in agricultural lands, which they in turn leased to local producers. Thus one Weistum from Albisrieden near Zürich ordered the residents of the village to take care that the urban citizens from whom they held their lands appeared at the manorial court.96
Finally, the obligation to take part in the manorial court of a lordship could also extend to members of neighboring lordships. Complex entanglements of property-holding and lordship relationships led to local legal constellations in which one lordship overlapped with another in manorial or legal authority. Most of the cloisters in the vicinity of Zürich administered not only their own manors, over which they were lords, but also individual farmsteads that they held from the college of canons as hereditary tenures, much like peasants would have done. Like the peasants, these cloisters were required to have their fiefs renewed and there are charters of re-enfeoffment created by the college for the cloisters of Wettingen, Kappel, Ötenbach, Selnau, and St. Martin auf dem Zürichberg, and the cloister of the Dominicans in Zürich. All these charters bound the renewal of the tenure to the stipulation that the tenant cloister dispatch a member to the local manorial court assemblies.97 The “court associates” or “dependents” on whose presence the manorial court especially relied included not least urban citizens and representatives of neighboring lordships.
“The Lords”
No less complex was the composition of those participants in the assembly who assumed the role of lordship. In practice the “dependents” at a manorial court confronted not an individual lord but a multitude of lordly representatives. To some extent the Weistümer themselves made this explicit. The records for places under the lordship of cloisters particularly emphasize that an abbess, abbot, or provost as manorial lord shared the presidency of the manorial court with a noble representative (advocatus). Statements that, for example, refer to the presence of “honorable men, nobles, and knights” at the manorial court recall that often many lords—among whom the local lordship rights were shared—needed to be represented.98
The actual holder of local lordship rights seldom personally took part in the manorial court. According to most descriptions of specific court assemblies, underlings presided over the court as judges and thereby ruled “in place of” (“anstatt”) the lord, “on behalf of said” (“von heissens wegen”) lord, or “in the name of” (“im Namen”) the lord. For example, the minor lords as well as the nobles of Mont relinquished their attendance at their court assemblies to their castellans. According to witness deposition statements, the castellans in turn were represented in their absence for years by subaltern officials (nunci) at the manorial court; presumably, these were low-ranking dependents from the relevant village or a neighboring one.99 At best the lords personally took part in their own manorial courts when they themselves had a suit to bring, and when they called for a law declaration ceremony.100 Nonetheless, a lord could send a representative to the judge even when bringing a suit. At the manorial court of the Aargau village of Döttingen in 1398, the local cellarer presided in the name of the actual manorial lord, the abbot of St. Blasien, while another representative of the abbot, from the nearby town of Baden, appeared before him.101 One representative of the lord requested the other to have the court associates declare the local regulations regarding the use of pasture land.
The fact that the activities of the manorial court were dominated by representatives of the lord imparted a very practical meaning to the symbolic representation of lordship rights. Descriptions of manorial courts in witness deposition statements and charters often mention the court staff of office as an emblematic object that fulfilled this function. The representative of the lord gave this staff to the representative of the advocatus as soon as there was a question to be decided that fell under his authority, and high officials passed the staff to those they delegated to preside over the court.102 During an actual declaration ceremony, the court staff served to represent lordly power while distinguishing it from the person who exercised it in that instance. In declaration texts, the depiction of the lord apparently fulfilled a similar function. The description of his arrival did not depict the regular routine of the manorial court but rather reflected the symbolic language with which the Weistümer described the lordship system.
Political Functions
The presence of different lordly representatives at the manorial court is directly linked to the scarcely ever acknowledged fact that, through their declarations, these assemblies not only regulated the relations between lords and their peasants but also decided conflicts between lords at all levels. This expansion beyond regulating relations between lords and peasants is most readily apparent when manorial courts settled conflicts between the lordship and its local officials and ministeriales. Another key task of the manorial courts involved the resolution of conflicts between the local manorial lord (Grundherr) and the jurisdictional lord (Vogteiherr). Charters repeatedly show how representatives of manorial and jurisdictional lords or other competing lords settled conflicts over the division of fines and fees through the declarations of their shared dependents.103
