This chapter begins our examination of the origins of the common law. Many accounts – including that of Maitland – begin just before the Norman Conquest and explore how centralised authority had developed in the late Anglo-Saxon period. This is the focus of this chapter, which explores the debate as to the importance of this period by examining the characteristics of the late Anglo-Saxon legal system. This chapter will explore what the Anglo-Saxon inheritance was. The first section will look at the historical debate as to where the history of English law begins and the importance that should be placed on the Anglo-Saxon period. It will contrast the still influential approach of Maitland with more recent scholars, most notably Patrick Wormald. The second section will then outline what is considered to be the major achievement of the long Anglo-Saxon period as a whole: the move from feud to compensation. The third and final section will then explore how what we would call the legal system had developed by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. It will ask what did William the Conqueror inherit and to what extent this provided some foundation for the English common law.

This chapter argues that the growth of litigation after 1550 is not an indicator of a decline of enmity among the social elite. In fact, the opposite is the case: social change generated new enmities which were fought using legal writs. The late sixteenth-century explosion of violence was not an indicator of ‘backwardness’ but a consequence of status anxiety as Renaissance ideas about merit and worth challenged traditional ideas about hierarchy and virtue. In the sixteenth century a great deal of conflict was generated by anxiety over reputation and the requirement to prove one’s status and place in the social order. The literature on the culture of enmity in Germany is arguably the richest in any European language. This is largely because south-west Germany and the Rhineland were the epicentres of the European witch craze. The ubiquitous recourse to magic was not just to snare a lover or restore health but also to take revenge. The records generated by witch hunts shed light on village disputes and the politics of enmity more widely. This chapter sets out to establish the parameters of the culture of enmity, to discuss some of its rituals and practices, and to show the ways in which the social elite attempted to distinguish itself from ordinary folk by adopting new forms of dispute resolution.

This chapter challenges some prevailing beliefs about the decline of violence and the rise of the English state. Neighbourliness was a ‘critical social ideal’ that underpinned social relations in early modern England. But village life was characterised by an atmosphere of contention and sometimes bitter enmity. Neighbourliness was put under strain by a population rise during the sixteenth century, as growing numbers of poor began to burden the community. Litigation did not supplant violence. The murder rate, moderate in the 1560s and 1570s, rose sharply in the 1580s and 1590s. Indictments reached a peak in the 1620s and did not fall to the levels that had prevailed in the mid-sixteenth century until the early eighteenth century. I present new evidence that the overall homicide rate in England was much higher than is usually claimed. The new pattern requires us to re-examine the effectiveness of the machinery of repression. I demonstrate that judicial records alone are insufficient for studying violence and suggest some alternative sources for capturing the history of violence and assess how that helps us to rethink the traditional narrative.

Feuding was a custom in many German-speaking lands well into the seventeenth century. Though the legal Fehde was criminalized in 1495, the practice continued to be widespread at the end the sixteenth century. I suggest five broad chronological patterns governing interpersonal violence. First, we see a continuation of the legal institution of the Fehde in the first half of the sixteenth century. Matters were considerably worsened by the Reformation. This was followed by a period of peace following the Religious Peace of Augsburg. But an explosion of elite violence in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, which peaked only in the 1610s, points to a third phase. There are grounds for thinking that the adoption of duelling by the elite formed part of a general pattern of rising violence in this period. The boom in litigation after 1555 is therefore indicative less of a decline than of growing social strains and conflict. The upheaval of the Thirty Years’ War altered the emotional field and privatised violence. The final phase suggests that the civil war had long-term effects and that elite violence, in particular, was only gradually brought under control during the early decades of the eighteenth century.

investigates the troubled last years of tenth Imam ʿAlī al-Hādī and his son al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī. Hādī faced challenges from esoterist bābs claiming authority, most notably the renegade agent Fāris b. Ḥātim, who posed such a threat that Hādī ordered his assassination. Such challenges were compounded by a bitter succession dispute catalyzed by the unexpected death of Hādī’s designated heir, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad. This created confusion in the community, and doubt about the next Imam, al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī. Ḥasan was accused by his opponents of lacking the requisite knowledge to be an Imam, dogged by his infertility, and opposed by another brother, Jaʿfar. This dispute over Imamic succession generated a feud which was to continue after Ḥasan’s death and create a fundamental flaw between pro-Jaʿfar and anti-Jaʿfar camps that split both the family of the Imams itself, as well as their followers, and defined the development of the Twelver Occultation.

This chapter discusses violence associated with the exercise of lordship and the culture of nobility in Europe from ca. 500-1500. For most of the twentieth century, historians argued that lordly violence rose and fell in inverse proportion to the power of ‘sovereign’ rulers, such as kings and emperors. It is now recognized that aristocrats in general and lords in particular played roles in medieval societies and polities that made their use of violence not just tolerable but also necessary. The practice of ‘feud’ has also come in for reassessment, increasingly understood not as anarchic or usurpatory, but re-envisaged as rule-based and self-limiting. Yet, if seigneurial violence now appears much more socially productive and politically intelligible to historians, it is important to realize that the exercise and experience of seigneurial violence varied a great deal according to social position and context. Aristocratic women were less likely than aristocratic men to be involved in such conflicts, and non-aristocrats, of both sexes, bore the brunt of the violence. This essay proceeds chronologically, examining changes in the ideas and practices that shaped how lords and nobles used violence in different regions.