Outlawry, governance, and law in medieval England

This work seeks to understand the role of exile, banishment, and outlawry in law and governance in England from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries.;Traditional historical narratives dismiss exile, outlawry, and banishment as ineffective and weak methods of maintaining social order. This work reassesses these forms of exclusion in matters of politics, law, and society as well as their influence upon increased use of imprisonment in later medieval England.;During the Anglo-Saxon period, outlawry and exile were the predominant mechanisms for maintaining social order. Outlawry served as a powerful tool that received only intermittent attention by the Crown in the pre-Conquest era. With the coming of the Normans in the middle of the eleventh century, little changed. Outlawry continued to thrive and the Anglo-Norman kings continued to exile their political enemies. Imprisonment became a more common element of royal power, although often reserved for nobility.;By the twelfth-century legal reforms of Henry II, gaols and imprisonment found a firm foothold within law in England. The increased reliance on imprisonment, however, did not necessarily mean the end of outlawry. As the Crown attempted to centralize its authority, it co-opted outlawry as it had been practiced in the localities, and integrated it more fully into royal legal process. Outlawry continued to be pronounced in county courts, but was brought increasingly within the scope of the common law felony processes and control over the process of outlawry was shifting towards judges and away from the Crown's executive power.;Unlike their Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman predecessors, Angevin kings could only impose outlawry through judicial processes that were increasingly insulated from direct royal control. As a result and in conjunction with the expanding administrative framework of the common law, English kings began to formulate criminal law policies which relied more on imprisonment and other modes of punishment that focused upon the detention of wrongdoers than on the exclusion of wrongdoers from the community. The increased use of imprisonment was both a cause and a result of the failed royal effort to maintain social control in medieval England.