Church courts heard a range of non-criminal disputes between parishioners. Organised along diocesan lines, they were responsible for prosecuting sin and maintaining morality within parishes. Aggrieved parties pursued suits against their neighbours over defamation, payment of tithes, breaches of marital contracts and bequests made in wills. The court also made its own enquiries into parishioners’ behaviour through periodic visitations. The bishop and his deputies made circuits around the diocese to root out and prosecute miscreants, thereby generating what was known as ex officio complaints in the church courts, in which adultery, non-attendance at church and clerical misdemeanours loomed large.
When witnesses were required to provide evidence in a case, they were asked to respond to a set of questions (articles) drawn up by the plaintiff(s) in relation to the alleged offence committed by the defendant(s). Their responses were recorded along with a short biography of the witness, which detailed their age, marital status or occupation and place of residence. A form of cross-examination of the witness by the defendant (known as an interrogatory) was permitted, and questions were designed to discredit their testimonies. In this process, defendants summoned their own witnesses who testified their objections (exceptions) to the plaintiff’s witnesses. This process could be reciprocated by the original plaintiff until a resolution was reached (usually out of court, as few verdicts survive).
Pastoral works from as early as the twelfth century set out who was considered an appropriate witness in the church courts. In 1216, Tancred in his
Ordo Judicionis labelled the testimonies of ‘the unfree, children, and the poor’ as unacceptable. Women were not entirely excluded from the church courts; in the courts studied here they represented up to around 20 per cent of all witnesses. But serious reservations were expressed about female testimony.
1 Bronach Kane, Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, Women and Testimony in the Church Courts, c.1200–1500 (Woodbridge, 2019), p. 49. Age was also an important determinant in assessing the quality of a witness.
2 Laura Gowing, for example, notes that in London church court depositions the young were frequently undermined by defendants who suggested that their youth made them less credible witnesses. See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), p. 50. The result was that across the late medieval and early modern periods, female witnesses were produced in fewer numbers than their male counterparts and younger deponents appeared less frequently than older witnesses.
3 Mansell, ‘The variety of women’s experiences’, 322; Charmian Mansell, ‘Female Servants in the Early Modern Community: a Study of Church Court Depositions from the Dioceses of Exeter and Gloucester, c.1550–1650’, unpublished PhD dissertation (University of Exeter, 2016).Exceptions raised against witnesses fed into these ideas of who was deemed suitable. By the sixteenth century, serfdom had virtually vanished in England. In this context, being ‘unfree’ to testify might therefore be better understood not as bondage to a lord but in relation to economic or familial ties to the litigant party. Doubt was cast on those hired by the party as a servant or apprentice, those indebted to them, or members of their biological family. This, however, did not prevent servants, apprentices or family members from testifying. Exceptions made to witnesses are sometimes hyperbolic, often representing extreme views designed to discredit the opposing party’s witnesses. Contradictory assessments of character were often given in the courts, depending on whose side the witness was on. However, the accuracy of these assessments of a witness’ character is of lesser importance here. The types of accusation levelled at witnesses were typically commentaries on their economic activities (including wealth and labour) and their social behaviours (including intellect, sobriety, morality and neighbourliness). For the words of an opposing witness to serve as an effective and plausible exception (thereby rendering the target witness’ deposition unsuitable or untrustworthy), they had to play to established mentalities and vocabularies of misbehaviour and disorder.