Ch4 Crime and Punishment 1of4 Feud Glorious Feud XviD AC3 MVGroup org

no matter who you are or what you do every aspect of your life is governed by the love it controls where you can walk and where you can't when you can drink and how much how you're expected to behave in public and yet even though it's so important hardly any of us have got a clue how it came into being in this series I'm going to try and find out where our laws came from who made them and why I'll be on a fascinating and sometimes bizarre journey that'll take me from trials by ordeal imagine the damage that I would have caused your hand through the decapitation of a king to the emergence of modern democracy over the next four programs I'll see how the Normans created the first surveillance society how today's compensation culture was started by the anglo-saxons loss of an eye fifty shillings or today five thousand pounds and how a man whose bodies kept in a London cupboard inspired us to stop stringing people up and start banging them up instead the law we live with today has been 2,000 years in the making and it's still work-in-progress and though we can't assume that laws will always change for the better at least if we know where the law came from we can keep Nile where it's going the early history of our law is completely bound up with our geography as an island nation we've been subject to wave after wave of invaders each of whom have brought their own way of doing things in this program we're going to be looking at the first millennium ad it's a tale of four invasions and the conquest starting with the Romans and ending with the Normans this is the story of a time that saw the laying down of the very foundations of English law the first of our four invaders were the Romans we all know the story they built the greatest empire the world had ever seen and everywhere they went they imposed their extraordinary culture great public buildings exquisite architecture straight roads heated baths drainage systems art literature education so what cornerstones of law did this epic civilization leave us with not much there are three hefty tomes of Roman law clean of Li the Codex and the digest but they all come from different parts of the Empire and anyway they're from a period long after the Romans left Britain there isn't a single trace of any law the Romans used while they were in Britain not a sausage so if the Romans didn't play a part in the creation of our legal system who did well amazingly it comes from the time that most of us don't know anything about it's time to light up the dark ages the Dark Ages was the name given by early historians to the six hundred year period after the fall of the Roman Empire because there was so little written down to tell us what happened but we do know now that the next group of invaders had a massive influence on our country and its laws from around 400 AD waves of foreign invaders started to appear on our shores from way over there in northern Germany and southern denmark that had names like the Jutes and the Saxons and the angles but pretty soon the locals lump them all together and just called them the Saxons which is where we get the word sass an act from of course they'd been Saxons settling here in dribs and drabs since the Roman times but now that the Romans had left the numbers began to increase dramatically and pretty soon they started sending back home not just for reinforcements but for their wives and kids too these guys were here to stay it wasn't long before the Saxons controlled large swathe of eastern England with their extended families forming rural settlements like here at the reconstructed anglo-saxon village at West Stowe in Suffolk we don't know exactly how legal matters were settled in these early days but everything from stealing a goat right up to murder was probably decided by the head of the family if you fell out with the family in a neighboring village then it was quite acceptable to take the law into your own hands and sort things out by a blood feud the basic idea was if anybody hurt you you were allowed by law to hurt them back so this is how it went this is a real story from the northeast of England there was this bloke called uh 'tried and he wanted to marry this girl but the bride's father said he would only allow them to get married if first of all uh 'tried murdered someone he hated called fur brand but before ultra could do the dirty deed fur brand ambushed ultras and killed him and 40 of his holes and at that moment things really kicked off because ultras family demanded revenge saluted son murdered at fur brain and fur brains family was so cross that the brand son murdered Brutus son and usage family were furious by now and they killed no no children buried grandchildren well and mercifully that's where things came to a halt after three generations and 60 years and extraordinarily that's how things were settled legally in Saxon times the blood feud was probably used only in the most serious legal disputes for everything else the head of the family acting as local law enforcement officer was probably enough sorting out problems within the extended Saxon family group was clearly a pretty effective way of doing things because it lasted for hundreds of years but then a new influence arrived and it cast an entirely new slant on law within this country and once again it came from across the sea by the middle of the first millennium ad England was a Saxon land the law was sorted out by the head of the extended family group within each village but before long these villages started joining together to form small kingdoms each with a king dictating his own laws one particular king came under the influence of an outsider who had changed the whole direction of our law in the year five nine seven ad a new invader appeared from across the water his name was sintel gustan and he was armed not with a sword but with a cross soon after central Gaston landed in Kent he converted the local ruler King Athol Burt and persuaded him to do what they did on the Christian continent write down the law but at Albert's law code the very first written in English wasn't just an anglo-saxon version of the Ten Commandments things like thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal it also contained huge amounts of detail about an area of the law that you might think of as quite modern compensation someone who can help translate it for us is historian dr. Sam Newton this Sinden da du mas de Ethelbert Kooning a setter on Agostino daya what is contained within this book of law well as you would expect a law code in writing building on the great precedent of the Ten Commandments so laws against thieving and killing and adultery but more than that it goes on to give a fantastic detail about the various injuries that I could do to you that I then I will be liable to pay you compensation for what kind of things well all sorts for example where I could break your arm or as it says here if a arm for burl could weigh earth six shilling home you beta which means if I were to break your arm I would be liable to pay you compensation of six shillings in old money very loosely equivalent yeah a day to about six hundred pounds six hundred pearls right let's do this properly Bob that's not bad that's wolf Knopf watch the wolf enough our what sales right wolf North give us your arm that is worth 600 pounds what else Sam okay were you to strike off his foot you'd be liable for fifty shillings loosely equivalent to five thousand pounds five thousand for your foot can you put that on wolf enough yep strike out IO or I fifty shillings or today five thousand pounds in eyeball five thousand four and I loss of speech twelve shillings or twelve hundred pounds of modern money 1,200 pounds p.m. mouth yep and most importantly for the male of the species loss of marriage tackle in wolf North case six hundred shillings which would be sixty thousand pounds what is the Saxon for marriage tackle you could delete you live literally the limb with which one would Kindle the next generation of the kid can you stick that on your kindling limb and the reason that is such a very high figure is that he represents the murder of the next generation sixty thousand pound for a kindling limb Oh give me sixty surprisingly we still put values on body parts today although modern law states of kindling limb is worth just thirty thousand pounds half the Saxon equivalent with many thousands of claims made each year our compensation system has become a multi-billion pound industry whose payouts can often be highly controversial following the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005 the government offered compensation to the hundreds of victims and families involved but placing a meaningful value on personal injuries is a difficult and emotive issue examples include 3,300 for a broken leg 110,000 for loss of sight and 250,000 for total paralysis or serious brain injury as well as compensating for the loss of the limb the saxons also had amounts specified for loss of life a system called weird guild where means man as in werewolf and guild means money so we're guild is the money that you have to pay if you kill a man and if you did kill someone you better make sure that you've got a lot of cash on you because if you killed a king it would cost you twelve thousand shillings which is round about 1.2 million pounds in today's money if you killed a Thane or nobleman it would cost you one thousand two hundred twenty thousand pounds today if you killed a churl or peasant that was going to be two hundred shillings which is about twenty thousand pounds and here an element of racism crops up in anglo-saxon law because if you killed a Welshman it would only cost you 60 shillings which is about six thousand pounds today so if you wanted to kill somebody it would be much cheaper to kill him and to kill him before long Christianity spread through all the Saxon kingdoms and for the first time in our history the law was properly codified right across the land the different Saxon Kings had their own sets of written laws which were known as dooms for instance King 'inna of Wessex wrote if anyone fights in the King's house it shall be in the Kings judgment whether or not he shall lose his life excuse me darlin whereas King Guthrum of East Anglia wrote if witches or notorious adulteresses be found anywhere within the land let them be driven from the country and just wait King Edmund wrote he who commits fornication with a nun let him not be worthy of a consecrated burial place so by the end of the 10th century the Christian tradition of writing down laws had spread throughout the entire country the arrival of Christianity brought another powerful idea hell and with it a development that's still with us today the swearing of the religious oath so now when you went before the local headman the fear of eternal damnation would put you under extra moral pressure to tell the truth today if you're called in front of a court as a defendant or a witness then the court will ask you to swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and if you're religious then you'll swear it on the holy book of your religion but back in Saxon times the religious oath was much more than simply a promise to tell the truth it was the way the vast majority of legal disputes were resolved the swearing of ODEs would have taken place in what was known as the hundred court the hundred was the name of a saxon area roughly equivalent to a modern parish probably because it contained about a hundred households and these hundred courts was situated on prominent features in the landscape how'd the swearing of ODEs actually have worked there would have been some sort of formula and it would be an occasion that would be undertaken in the front of others there will be a public event and if you were a man of honor that oath should be enough okay I want to accuse you of snogging my wife what happens next I would then be potentially guilty of a crime which I need to prove my innocence yeah an initial way would be to swear formally on oath that I am not guilty and the formal oath would be I would use this formula on bond written I am on shielding eggther yay dad yay dictor's uttered on chucklin they Tony may tick which means loosely translated by the Lord I am guiltless I am not guilty either in deed or counsel of the charge which Tony accuses me of simply swearing those words was enough to settle most legal cases back in sack sometimes sadly fear of eternal damnation is not what it once was in 1999 Tory MP Jonathan akin was sentenced to 18 months in prison for lying under oath in court and a couple of years later Jeffrey Archer got four years for the same crime somehow you just know they weren't with the last in Saxon England if a legal dispute couldn't be settled by the swearing of odds alone then it had to go to the next level the church no longer was at the place of the village head to decide the case but instead it was the local priest calling on the judgement of God himself the verdict would be determined by the dreaded trial by ordeal it was up to the accuser to choose one of three gruesome options for the defendant to face the first trial was the trial by hot iron which involved the accused walking nine paces carrying a lump of red-hot metal the second trial was the trial by cold water which involved the accused being thrown into a river which had been blessed by a priest and if they were guilty they'd float because the water had rejected them and if they were innocent they would sink because the water had accepted them of course they might drown as well that was just tough but the third trial was the trial by boiling water almost any crime could see you facing trial by ordeal from theft or forgery right up to sexual misconduct heresy or witchcraft and according to ancient manuscripts there was a very particular way the trial by ordeal had to be conducted concerning the ordeal this bit is very important no man shall come within the church after the fire is borne in with which the ordeal shall be heated in other words somebody closes the door before they start just like they do in a courtroom today because once the ordeal has been set up that's what this church has become a courtroom now if it be a single accusation let the hand dive after the stone up to the wrist and if it be three fold up to the elbow it goes now you may notice that I've used tongs I didn't do it like they originally did that's because if I had it would have flipping hurt but we do have a record of someone who actually put his hand in and it says as soon as he put his hand in the water immediately his flesh was melted down to the very joints of his bones and fell off right that's the ordeal now God's judgment okay it says let his hand be enveloped and it be postponed till after the third day whether it be foul or clean within the envelope in other words what they did was they bandaged up the poor blokes hand for three days and at the end of the third day they took the bandage back off again and if his hand had healed then God had found him innocent and if it was all Pasi and foul and bloated then God had found him guilty and that was the legal procedure for stealing a sheep or something at least the laws progressed in some areas since then so what happened if you failed the trial by ordeal well the village elder would decide on the appropriate punishment might be fine or some kind of corporal punishment but if the crime had been really serious it meant the death penalty in everyday Saxon life you are never far from a physical reminder of the law and executions mostly in the form of hanging were no exception this is one strike in Wiltshire and I've come here with dr. Andrew Reynolds an archaeologist specializing in Saxon justice to see how the landscape itself was used to demonstrate the power of the law so if I was an anglo-saxon standing up here what would I have seen that would remind me of the presence of the law or one of the most interesting is about anglo-saxon judicial practice is that it uses lots of different places in the landscape to kind of form a full judicial system and one of these locations would have been the court where people were tried and if you look right over there on the horizon you can see a clump of trees in the in the far distance that's the site of the--of the Judicial Court of 100 meeting place what else and again well if you look South you can see again the location of another one of these judicial meeting places or hundred courts okay so we've got one hundred court we've got the church in which the trial by ordeal takes place and found guilty then what well if it all goes very badly and you're found guilty you end up being taken literally to the limits of your local community which is the hundred the boundary of the hundred and that's where we're standing at the moment and then we'll harvest it well you be hanged or decapitated but well I tell you what standing I'm here you realize that if someone was hung here you'd be able to sit for twenty five miles all around absolutely again that's the whole point of having a gallows with with bodies swinging from it is a physical and permanent expression of the power of the king later on they used to punish people in the middle of market squares didn't they yeah wine in this period did they hang people on boundaries was a very strong sense it seems of literally driving people to the limit of the judicial territory and the furthest you can drive from of course is to the limit of the hundred so barring people on the hundred boundaries witchy you physically expressing them from the community as far as you can but of course has also an ideological aspect to this and we know from a range of sources that the anglo-saxons thought of boundary locations as a places which were marginal liminal inhabited by kind of malevolent sort of creatures and monsters and so on and as if being executed in a place inhabited by foul spirits wasn't bad enough Saxon lore was still on your case after death the Dark Ages in this country saw a huge shift in the law where once legal disputes have been settled by the head of the family now they were in the hands of local kings and the almighty and the long arm of the law even extended into the grave this is Sutton Hoo in Suffolk a burial site for Saxon criminals following excavations here archaeologists made a series of resin casts of some of the bodies they found it's hard to see exactly what we've got here Andrew well what we've got here is a series of casts of the archaeological remains as they were as they were excavated so you can see for example the lower legs the lower parts of the legs here the upper legs here the pelvic area here and you can see the arm the left arm here there's the elbow roughly there and the lower arm so where's the head well and this is again a great indication that this is an execution burial because the cast is actually describing the limit of the grave and you can see that the neck area is here the head is that had is missing for Syria so the head should have been there but we've actually got the grave going around there like that so we know it's missing what's the significance of that well this is almost certainly someone who's being decapitated for rococo committing a crime theft or examples I wanted one of the main reasons why someone might what might be decapitated this one is that very facedown it certainly is I mean if you look at the lower legs for example you can see here that the legs are bending down towards the floor of the grave here and then back up to the back of the pelvis here then if you look at the forearms you can see that the forearm on the right hand side and Parsees underneath the pelvis and on the left here it passes underneath the pelvis also now this suggests of course that you've got a person with a hands tied to the front of the body buried facedown in the grave something very bleak particularly in this landscape of having all these people killed in different ways and buried in different ways what's the implication of that I think the implication of it is is that it wasn't just a case of Samara Lee executing people and throwing them in the nearest ditch the ways in which these people have arid is highly ritualized for example with the face down people this is normally an indication of the fact that the people in the people still living were terrified of this individual we know that there was a kind of a fear of the Dead coming back to home living on one way to kind of solve this issues to bury the person facedown they come alive in the ground the only way they can dig is down and not up I'm usually quite relaxed about skeleton because I've seen so many through excavations there is something very spooky about the fact that people were so scared of this person they buried them face tear certainly is I mean one wonders what offense this person committed in life the bodies at Sutton Hoo provide a graphic example of how the anglo-saxons had a legal system covering all aspects of justice from life through to death this was a time though when laws were still local with the country divided into a number of kingdoms but the arrival of yet more outsiders would spark off the move towards a united country under one king with a single set of laws round about the year 788 a another wave of invaders arrived in England the men from the north the Vikings that are but don't be fooled by misconceptions the Vikings weren't just a bunch of blokes with horny helmets who raped and pillaged their way across England they were pretty civilized really most of them were farmers and settlers and traders and they began establishing their settlements all the way down the east coast of England in what became known as the Danelaw law or lager is a Viking word that means fixed or set down and the Danelaw at its greatest extent this Scotland there stretched all the way from Chester down to London so it was a huge swathe of the country I think I'll dig that up and sell it on eBay the Vikings arrived in enormous numbers sweeping down through the country as the Danelaw expanded absorbing kingdoms as it went Saxon England was in danger of disappearing altogether but one kingdom held out Wessex whose leader would become a legend known to history as Alfred the Great his dream was to create a united country and in his drive to achieve it he would transform our legal system Alfred's first encounter with the Vikings was on the battlefield but he was defeated and forced into hiding the most famous story about Alfred occurs during the Viking advance when things are going very badly for him and he's forced to travel around the country in disguise and he hides in this peasant woman's heart and she asks him to keep an eye on her cakes for her because they're cooking in the fire but he forgets because he's so bad up with his troubles and the cakes burn and the woman gives him the sharp edge of her tongue and whether the story is true or not it's after the alleged cake burning incident that Alfred manages to rally his men and defeat the Vikings in fact he never defeated them completely but he did manage to hold them at bay by making a truce with them then he did something quite extraordinary he harnessed the law as a weapon to shore up his kingdom of Wessex against the Vikings one of his first acts was to produce a written law code that compared him to Moses the great biblical leader chosen by God the implication was that Alfred's laws were handed down from the very highest authority and that the English were God's chosen people now he may have thought of himself as an Old Testament prophet but some of his ideas we think of as very modern for instance in his law codes he talks about how he thinks that people should be judged and you should know that in this context the word doom means to judge he says doom very evenly do not do one doom to the rich another to the poor nor do one doom to your friend another to your foe in other words he's saying that everyone that should be judged equally in front of the law which is something we'd feel pretty happy about today by creating laws like this alfred was determined to make Wessex a fairer and more attractive place to live in than the neighboring Dane law it's all too easy to think of Alfred as the king who accidentally burnt somebody else's cakes because he was so preoccupied with defeating the Vikings but actually it's precisely this preoccupation with the Vikings which made him the great lawmaker he became because once he'd halted their advance he became determined to build an ideological bulwark against them by creating a powerful sense of Englishness the king now turned his attention to the way the law was enforced just as today we have a legal hierarchy that culminates in the European Court of Justice so alfred organized his courts with an appeal system that could go all the way to the top starting with the parish or hundred court and if you didn't like a decision from the hundred court you'd go to the next level the shire court which was pretty much like the county court today and finally if you weren't happy with either of those two courts you'd go to the highest court in the land the king's court nowadays of course the British monarchy doesn't take any part in the functioning of the law courts but back in 9th century England King Alfred himself was the highest court in his kingdom of Wessex and local people seemed to be entirely uninhibited about approaching him with legal problems for instance there's this story about this bloke called Ethel helm who was in dispute with some other men about the ownership of some land and they couldn't come to any conclusion so they went to the highest court there was they burst in on King Alfred while he was in the bathroom and they explained to him what the problem was and he finished washing his hands and then gave them his judgment what a pity that Queen Elizabeth doesn't dispense hands on legal judgment like that nowadays within 20 years of Alfred coming to power any Saxon areas that hadn't been overrun by the Vikings were firmly part of his kingdom of Wessex and yet again he used the law to consolidate that power alfred was well on his way to forging a united kingdom in England but in order to do that he had to have the loyalty of his people so from now on every male over the age of 12 had to swear an oath of loyalty to the king it was a powerful way of showing everyone who was in charge nowadays most of us don't have to swear an oath of allegiance to the monarch but since 2004 one group of people in the UK does before immigrants to this country can qualify for British citizenship they have to take a test and answer some pretty tricky questions this is the book you have to study if you want to become a UK citizen it's called life in the UK and you have to get 75% of the answers right if you're going to pass how would you do how many assembly members are there in the National Assembly of Wales when you make an offer on a home you want to buy why must the offer be subject to contract how's the Speaker of the House of Commons chosen well I don't know about you but I've lived here all my life and I'm struggling already if applicants are successful the final stage in becoming a citizen is to attend a special ceremony in which they swear allegiance to the Queen and promise to respect the UK's Rights and Freedoms singing the national anthem is still optional for Alfred - swearing allegiance was part of his ideological armoury in his struggle against the Vikings and to ram it home he made sure that all his documents especially ones that concerned the law were written in plain simple English in Saxon times most people can read but because the law was written in English at least they'd be able to understand it if it was read to them but if Alfred insisted on clear and simple regulations a thousand years ago how come so much gibberish is written today listen to this this is the teachers advanced further education regulations of 1983 in these regulations a reference to a regulation is a reference to a regulation contained therein a reference in a regulation or the schedule to a paragraph is a reference to a paragraph of that regulation or the schedule and a reference in a paragraph to a subparagraph is a reference to a subparagraph of that paragraph have you got that King Alfred a returning these grave only Alfred's interest in the law was almost obsessive in a book written about him at the time a Welsh mouth called a sir described how the king would study in great detail the decisions made by his judges and if Alfred thought the judges had made bad judgments or were ignorant of the law he challenged them directly according to ass of the monk he said I am astonished at this ignorant of yours you have enjoyed the office and status of wise men yet you have neglected the study and application of wisdom for that reason I command you either to relinquish immediately the offices of worldly power that you possess or else to apply yourselves much more attentively to the pursuit of wisdom in other words if the judges were a bit dim or ignorant of the law Alfred would say to them go back to your books and study the law properly and the significance of this is that it's the first mention in English of anyone actually studying law this is a huge step forward in our legal history alfred was an incredibly enlightened thinker who also turned his attention to some outdated legal practices blood feuds was still an acceptable way of settling serious disputes if someone had killed a member of your family it was quite okay to go straight round to their house and bump them off but Alfred now made an inspired change to the law so that instead of settling the score immediately now you had to wait seven days before acting waiting seven days before you take your revenge is a brilliantly simple idea it was the original cooling-off period you let people's anger die down and let rational thought take over after the first day you'd probably start to think a bit more calmly and begin to wonder if it really was worth killing the bloke who'd made you so angry a couple of days later you might start bumping into the person that you wanted to take your revenge on wait and start talking to him hello hello alright he might persuade you that he didn't want to hurt you in the first place then before the seven days were over you'd probably genuinely calm down and shut him off down the pub alfred died in 899 ad and although the vikings were still around through his wise law reforms and the powerful sense of Englishness he'd instilled in his people he'd sown the seeds of a country united under a single king his dream was finally realized 25 years after his death when his grandson became the first King of All England our legal system had been transformed but what happened to you if you broke out for its new laws well that could be no fun at all by the end of the first millennium Saxon England was a united country with a sophisticated set of laws but how did the state deal with people who broke those laws these days we'd call in the boys in blue but the idea of a national police force was still hundreds of years away the Saxons enforced the law by mobilizing the whole community using a legal device known as the hue and cry in Saxon times if you saw a crime being committed then by law you had to raise the hue and cry which essentially meant Lee had to shout stop thief and then everyone over the age of 15 who heard it was legally obliged to form a posse and try and catch the criminal and if they were successful then the criminal was carted off in front of the local or official the Reeve of the Shire the Shire Reeve or sheriff as they were known and if you think that ancient history then think again what the idea of a sheriff raising a posse to enforce the law today is confined to westerns but the office of sheriff is still very much with us here are the judge's lodgings at Aylesbury the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire Amanda Nicholson is about to reward a local citizen Roy hat for performing a very Saxon act indeed in King Alfred's day the sheriff was a formidable and much feared law enforcer with unrivaled local powers these days the jobs are little less taxing what sort of things do you have to do I think basically we have to say thank you to people who have been working really hard and there are some marvelous people that you meet what sort of things have you actually enjoyed doing most where there's been such variety I mean I did not expect to have a trip behind the scenes of the crematorium for a start and I have been around lots of hospitals I've been to prisons and there's also citizenship ceremonies admitting citizens make a speech shake the hands and say congratulations on becoming British and the ceremony you're performing today really is a link with the law isn't it well yes I mean this is excellent this mr. hat has been awarded by the courts and I will give him a certificate which is enormous exciting and very very worthwhile so you'll be representing the court by having in this award yes Roy hat is the reason for today's ceremony because when he was out shopping one day with his missus he came to the aid of local police on the trail of a fleeing criminal or sudden we heard this shouting and they stop please stop because I look round and this great big hefty chat Curran charging towards me and her instinct told me you know try and stop him which I did what did your wife think where she was down and stop Roy stop all right everybody's going to stop me but and did you have any doubt about her eyes you just go in instinct it was interesting completely interesting so if all over no no I push him into the the wall of the side and which slowed him down sufficient for the police to actually stop him you're a have a go here oh oh yeah I'm honor or fool good luck if those are not Tony Chiz many congratulations thank you so much for what you did that was terrific very very brave indeed this is the judges citation he said many people would have remained frozen to the spot or moved out of the way when they saw this big burly thief running towards them Roy hat did not so there is a perfect anglo-saxon ceremony you've got the Reeve of the Shire congratulating the man who responded to the human cry but what happened if a criminal escaped the hue and cry and evaded capture altogether then he would become Boot Largo outside the law but forget the glamour of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest being an outlaw in Saxon England was pretty grim being branded an outlaw when you were literally outside the law the law no longer controlled you but that meant it no longer protected you either your land and property will forfeit to the king and you could be forced to live in hiding if an outlaw was found by other law abiding citizens they could do anything they liked with him and the law would turn a blind eye he was totally outside normal society not just an outlaw but a social outcast it was possible for a repentant outlaw to return to the protection of the law by becoming in law he'd have to stand trial for a second time but if he was found innocent he'd be declared a new person although he'd already lost all his land and property and there was no hope of getting that back again so forget the romance of being an outlaw if you're an outlaw in anglo-saxon times you didn't have very much fun at all so there you have it England a united country created by the anglo-saxons with a fair set of laws and a sense of Englishness that's still with us today and that might seem like an obvious place to end this first part of our story of the law but there's one piece of evidence that suggests the Saxons might have been the first people to use one of the most important institutions in legal history the jury the story goes something like this one year in the 10th century in North Wales there was a terrible drought in fact it was so bad that it looked as though all the crops would fail and there was a local noble woman called lady Krauss who went into the church to pray for rain and high up in the roof of the church there was the statue of the Virgin Mary holding a cross so lady trustus praying away like this when suddenly crash the cross slipped out of the Virgin Mary's hands bashas lady trout on the head and she dies and there's a incredible Ferrari in the village everyone is complaining they're all saying it was the statues fault the statue killed lady trout's so what did they do they got a jury together and I know this isn't a proper manuscript but this is a genuine quote they got a jury of 12 people Hin cut of hand cut span of man cut leech and leech and cumber beach peat and paint with Corbin of the gate milling and Hewett with Gil and pew it and these 12 jurors decided that the statue was guilty of murder and it should be hung until one of the jurors said look don't be daft you can't hang a statue there's a drought on let's drown it instead that is what they did they chucked it in the river the figure floated downstream where it was washed up in the local town which is possibly what's now Chester the locals picked up the statue which is described as being drowned and dead and they buried it now all this might be nothing more than a made-up story told by the people of Chester about their Welsh neighbors but if the story is true what about those 12 men who found the statue guilty it's just possible that they were the first-ever jury something that wouldn't become an established part of our legal system for another 200 years so in terms of the law maybe the Dark Ages weren't so dark after all the anglo-saxons had created a sophisticated system of courts and appeals they had legal professionals like sheriff's are much less drizzly attitudes towards things like blood feuds not only that but their laws were being written down in plain English if only things had stayed like that next time the law gets medieval I'll see how guilt was decided by the burning of flesh stinking vegetables the importance of farm produce in the execution of the law and how certain Norman punishments are still with us today

Channel: Lucie Edmunds

Views: 203,524

Rating: 4.7660255 out of 5

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Id: kn1gdZMLtrk

Length: 47min 38sec (2858 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

Part 3 New king on the block https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgCFt-_674Q

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

Part 4 Have I got noose for you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuq4FDa5Ik4

[u/new-monkey]

Thanks for posting - I'm on number 3 and enjoying them immensely

[u/mintymosmos]

This is great, thank you for the post

[u/easilypersuadedsquid]

Part 2 Guilty as Charred https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Avrik_Wamw