Daily Medieval

The Cinque Ports (Old French: "Five Harbors") were five towns on the southeast coast of England where the distance to the continen...

Trial by Ordeal took many forms in the ancient world and the Middle Ages. In a sense, it was an appeal to God to reveal the culprit. In Old ...

Hair is a fascinating resource. It is a crop that renews without any special tending, producing thread and cushioning. It can be cut, dyed, ...

Besides  Brehon Laws , Ireland had Cáin laws ( Cáin ="law"; redundant, I know) that were made with the help of church figures. Ado...

Congal Cáech was a king of the Irish province of Ulaid (on the north east coast) in the early 7th century. Cáech means  "squinting"...

Early Irish law was called Brehon Law, a system of civil (not criminal) rules, some of which survived until the 17th century when they were ...

See Parts one and two . The outcome of the trial was dire for Alice, her maid Petronilla, and her stepson William Outlaw. There were others...

Read the first part here . Bishop Richard Ledrede wants to try the case himself. In those days bishops had their own courts separate from ci...

Simply put, possession of land equalled power. The laws of primogeniture and ultimogeniture existed to keep estates together. There were pla...

Recent posts discussed practices of inheritance such as primogeniture and ultimogeniture . There was also, evolving from the feudal system,...

We are accustomed to linking inheritance with a preference for the eldest, even without strict primogeniture involved. In New York State in...

The Byzantine Emperor Justinian I had many accomplishments, but establishing the Corpus Juris Civilis ("Body of Civil Law"), oft...

A stannary was an administrative division in the counties of Cornwall and Devon based on tin-mining. The term comes from Middle English sta...

Alfred the Great (849 - 899) was not an idle king, even when not battling Danish invasions to protect the shores of Great Britain. Some of h...

After the Knights Templar were dissolved in 1312, Pope Clement V wanted all their property turned over to the Knights Hospitallers. King Edw...

Why were two of the compounds for legal training in London named "Inner Temple" and "Middle Temple"? First, let's ex...

To my surprise, I have used "law" or "laws" (should really get around to combining them) as keywords in 43 posts (out of...

Christians and Jews living in Muslim-controlled lands in the Iberian Peninsula were subject to Sharia Law...to a point. Sharia ( sharī'a...

I'll admit: I'm not a lawyer; I don't understand current legal terms (most of which are Latin holdovers from the Middle Ages). I...

The Treatise of Glanvill was the earliest comprehensive treatise on English Law. It's full name is Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinib...