The Coventry Leet Book, or Mayor's Register, Vol. 1

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Excerpt from The Coventry Leet Book, or Mayor's Register, Vol. 1: Containing the Records of the City Court Leet or View of Frankpledge, A. D. 1420-1555, With Divers Other MattersA leet is a court held by a lord of the manor or other liberty or the lord's grantee - for the trial of petty ofiences. Concerning the meaning and derivation of the word itself scholars are divided, and where Professor Skeat and the late Professor Maitland only ofier conjecture, it were best to suspend judgment. The derivation of the alternative to Court Leet, a word often occurring in these pages, view of frankpledge, is fairly assured, it is the Latinized - and mis taken - form of o.e. Frithborh peace-pledge, i. E. A tithing, or body of (normally) ten mutual sureties. The institution of the tithing tended to make every one his neighbour's policeman, and at a view of frankpledge every one amenable to the court's jurisdiction had to show himself properly included in an association of the kind.With all this, however, we have here small concern. J natices-in eyre and Justices of the Peace tended in time to diminish the import ance of manorial jurisdiction, and the Lost Book reveals the court of fifteenth century Coventry less as a judicial than as a legislative body. It is the town parliament rather than the town tribunal of justice. The records show a series of ordinances or by-laws grounded on the petitions of aggrieved parties presented to the Leet, arranged year by year with fair regularity from 1420 to 1555. These touch mediaeval urban life on every side, and are interwoven with a chronicle of the various happenings within the city. Of such is composed the great bulk of the matter of the Lost Book. A few leaves at the beginning and end of the volume, that would otherwise have been blank, were filled by Elizabethan and Stuart scribes with a miscellany that defies classification.The value of the Lest Book from the social historian's point of view will be treated of in the Introduction in a subsequent part. Members of the E. E. T. S. May feel equally interested in the volume from the philological standpoint, as illustrating the Warwickshire dialect in the century before Shakespeare's birth.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.