Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/183

 1920 BARONY AND THANAGE 175 the ' Leges Henrici ', that thanes as such had a right to receive ' wite ' for these offences as well as a fine for disobedience to their orders ; partly from the statement of the ' Instituta Cnuti ' (iii. 58) that bishops, who as we have seen had the same justiciary rights as thanes and barons, had in their own lands the jurisdiction of a hundred-court (hundred-setene), the price of a thief taken within their bounds, iron and water, weights and measures. ' Toll ' gave a man the right to buy and sell on his own land and to demand payment from others desiring to do the same there, to which custom seems to have added the right to hold a market ; and ' team ' empowered him to be warranty to sales, especially of cattle, to try cases arising out of warranty, and to hold property of unknown ownership found on his land, the ' waif ' of a later age.^ ' Infangthef ' gave him the right to try and to execute the thief taken on his land either in the act of stealing or with the stolen goods on him, and to take his chattels,^ a right to which custom added the right to have a gallows, when hanging had replaced beheading as the usual mode of execution.^ We read in the ' Leges Edwardi Confessoris ' (c. 20) that barons — in the 1140-50 version, archbishops, bishops, earls, barons, and all who have sac and soc, toll and team, and infangthef — had their own knights and household servants, stewards, butlers, chamberlains, &c., i. e. the ' hiredmen ' of the Anglo-Saxon laws, in their own ' friborh ', as these in turn had their own squires and other servants in theirs, and that if any complaint were made against any of them it was to be heard in the court of him who had sac and soc, toll and team, and infangthef. We conclude, there- fore, that under the Norman kings as under the Saxon, king's thanes and barons, merely as such, had, in addition to rights of ^ Liebermann, ii, s.v. ' Toll ' and ' Team '. For the latter compare Hlothar and Eadric's Laws, c. 16 ; Alfred and Guthrum's Frith, c. 5 ; Edward's Laws, i. 1 ; Edgar's Law of the Hundredgemot, c. 4 ; and II Cnut, c. 24. 2 Bracton, De Legibiis, iii (2), c. 55. Cf. the many claims to infangthef in the Plac. de Quo Warr. ; e. g. the baron of Greystoke claimed (p. 119) ' habere catalla felonum dampnatorum in curia sua et decollatorum in feodo suo que infra feodum Buum erunt inventa. . . etiam infangthef et furcas in Graystok ab antique '. in the Anglo-Saxon Laws which prove that beheading was the penalty for botlesa crimes before the Conquest. Even when hanging had generally taken its place, beheading remained the proper mode of executing thieves in the outlying parts of the country and especially in the liberties. Dugdale {Origines luridicales, p. 88) quotes a case in the earldom of Chester in the reign of Edward I, and there are several in the Northumberland Assize Bolls (pp. 70, 73, 340). Cox, in ' Sanctuaries and Sanc- tuary-men ' (Archaeol. Journ. Ixviii. 281, 290), shows that beheading long survived in the liberty of St. Peter of York. Beheading also remained the proper mode of executing offenders against the Laws of the Marches down to the end of the sixteenth century {Cal. of State Papers, Foreign, Eliz. vii, no. 917), as it did for barons to a much later date. In 1314 the king's council decided that thenceforth beheaded criminals were to be held to have been himg, so that the king might have their goods {Rot. Pari. i. 293-6).
 * Stephens, History of the Criminal Law of England, i. 58 ff., quotes the passages