many Weistümer.104
Furthermore, suits were often brought before the manorial court of a lordship by other lords and their dependents. During the second half of the fourteenth century, citizens of the small city of Büren regularly appeared before the manorial court of the neighboring village of Pieterlen, which was subject to a different lordship. There they raised objections to the declaration of the boundary lines between the two lordships and thereby defended their own interests as well as those of their lord before a foreign manorial court.105 While Weistümer often define who must appear before the manorial court, they conspicuously stipulate no restrictions on admittance. Weistümer and witness depositions show that those assembled at a manorial court included not only members of a limited local population but also any number of notables who had a vested interest in the legal order of a particular place.
To be sure, there were eminently practical reasons to settle conflicts between lords that concerned local legal relationships before village manorial courts. The residents and notables from the area assembled there were in a better position than higher-level ecclesiastical or territorial courts to survey the complex local legal network, with its competing interests arising from the usage, manorial, and judicial rights of multiple parties. Especially in areas with less-developed systems of territorial administration, there were no legal entities below the level of the Holy Roman Empire that could claim jurisdiction over several lords involved in one conflict. Documents that were produced from higher-level jurisdictions, which were generally legitimized “from above,” might enjoy higher prestige. Yet the regulations legitimated “from below” by the declarations of manorial courts were often more practical for, in addition to the dependents, these also included the local officials and elites against whom they were to be enforced or under whose supervision they would be implemented in everyday life.
It would be naïve to describe manorial courts simply as forums for the harmonious and well-ordered settlement of disputes. In depositions witnesses often argued that the mere fact that a lordship regularly held a manorial court in a particular place showed that the place was under his control.106 According to the same logic, conflicts between lords were often ignited by the question as to which court’s jurisdiction particular people and areas were subject. Thus the canon chapter of Amsoldingen charged the local ministeriale, Berchtold of Amsoldingen, in a list of grievances written around 1300, alleging that he had alienated the chapter’s vineyard and sought to “weaken” and “oppress” its manorial court. Berchtold had forbidden all people who lived on the far side of the Amsoldingen lake to take part in the court assembly of the chapter. Instead, he had begun to hold his own assembly in front of his castle in Stocken, even though this castle fell under the jurisdiction of the chapter and furthermore had never been the site of a court assembly.107 In 1374 the priory of Romainmôtier complained to Countess Bonne of Savoy regarding similar circumstances in the village of Bursins, over which it claimed all rights of jurisdiction. According to the priory, the noble lords of Mont had recently begun to hold their own court assemblies in the cemetery of Bursins.
In 1482 inhabitants of the city of Lausanne composed a petition of grievance regarding their bishop and his officials. One of the complaints concerned a confidant of the bishop named Ludovicus Besson. When the lawful maior of the village of Lutry had called the manorial assembly at the usual time and place, Besson had seized control from him by force. Besson had suddenly appeared with an armed retinue, mounted the court bench, and named himself the new maior in front of the appalled assembly participants. A little later he began to hear cases as maior. In such conflicts the summoning of dependents to the manorial court functioned as a means of challenging the claims to jurisdiction of competing lords and establishing one’s own claims on the ground.
Weistümer are thus misleading when they depict manorial courts as forums that regulated the interaction between a lord and the totality of his dependents. Instead, what is manifest in court documents and witness depositions is the significance of these assemblies for the settlement of conflicts between lords and for their relationship to their officials or ministeriales. The references in charters to agreements between lordship and peasants in manorial courts are actually relatively few, mainly due to the fact that such agreements were seldom documented in writing. The constellations that were distinguished for legal purposes (lord-peasants and lord-lord) should not be translated directly into social oppositions. The rights of lords were often pled by local lordly officers who themselves were dependents of their lords, much in the way the role of dependent peasants could be filled not only by peasant producers but also by urban citizens, monasteries, or other corporate bodies that themselves claimed lordship rights in the vicinity. Regulations encountered in manorial courts correspond with legitimation “from below” not because they reflected the will of the lower social classes but rather because relations among notables were negotiated here without recourse to the higher-level lordly courts. In this form of delineating the law, the definition of vertical dependent relations between a lordship and its dependents was tightly interlocked with the horizontal delineation of rights between competing lordships.
Variations in the Transmission of the Law
From the standpoint of a modern understanding of law that is focused on legislative codification, one may be tempted to regard the manorial courts’ function of passing down law as compensation for the deficits of a society with less writing: regularly held legal declaration ceremonies seem to indicate a makeshift attempt to ensure a stable local legal order that would later be far better protected through written legal texts. At first glance it seems that late medieval Weistümer were also committed to such an understanding, for these often stipulated that the local law should be recalled to memory at each assembly of the manorial court through a declaration.108 In many Weistümer, moreover, the recording of legal regulations was explicitly justified by the fact that it would eliminate the uncertainty of oral transmission.109
But to what extent were declaration ceremonies suitable—and, indeed, intended—for relaying legal content unchanged over long periods? To answer this question, we must examine court records and witness deposition records alongside Weistümer. On this basis, there are four questions to be discussed in the following sections concerning the implementation of declaration procedures: What did medieval actors say about the mnemonic function of declaration ceremonies? For what reasons were they held? What processes therefore contributed to their operation? And what role did writing play in them? Ultimately, the relationship between the oral declaration ceremonies and the written Weistümer needs to be reassessed through an analysis of conflicts over how exactly to go about the declarations, among other things.
Mnemonic Functions
Without a doubt, declarations in manorial courts had great significance for late medieval actors. In some witness depositions, witnesses answered questions about valid laws by referring to the contents of legal declarations.110 In others witnesses boasted that they were particularly knowledgeable about local law by emphasizing that they had regularly taken part in the manorial court of their village for decades.111 In 1456 a witness from Kölliken related how he was brought to the manorial court by his father as a small boy. There, someone had ordered him and others of the same age to listen well to how the rights of the lord were declared so that they would later know them as adults.112 Especially in witness deposition records from German-speaking Switzerland in the fifteenth century, witnesses stated over and over, in a somewhat programmatic way, how important manorial courts were for passing on knowledge of local legal regulations from one generation to the next.
Witness deposition statements in particular indicate the limits of transmitting legal knowledge through manorial courts. They show, on the one hand, that relaying local legal knowledge did not take place exclusively at the manorial courts but rather to a considerable extent also in everyday conversations. When witnesses were systematically asked how they knew about a disputed regulation, they attributed it nearly as often to declarations in manorial courts as to other sources: for example, to conversations with older acquaintances and relatives—strikingly, often with their mothers—or
