ABSTRACT Manor courts held by landlords for their tenants and other local people existed in their thousands across medieval England. Debate persists concerning the character of these institutions during their heyday in the decades before 1350. This article uses a new database containing hundreds of manorial personal actions – lawsuits which treated areas roughly equivalent to modern tort and contract law – to explore the work of the manor courts, and to reconstruct their development over the first century for which records of their proceedings survive. It is argued that although local variation among manor courts persisted, overall there was a broad process of ‘convergence’. Yet this was not simply a top-down development involving the transmission of practices from the courts of common law, or the communication of external rules by lawyers or landlords. Instead, the suitors, litigants and jurors of the manor courts played a decisive role in this process.

中文翻译：

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中世纪英格兰庄园法院的演变，c.1250–1350：个人行为的证据

摘要 在中世纪的英格兰，由地主为租户和其他当地人开办的庄园法庭数以千计。关于这些机构在 1350 年之前的几十年鼎盛时期的性质的争论仍然存在。 本文使用一个包含数百个庄园个人行为的新数据库——处理大致相当于现代侵权和合同法领域的诉讼——来探索庄园的工作法院，并重建他们在第一世纪的发展，其诉讼记录幸存下来。有人认为，尽管庄园法院之间的局部差异持续存在，但总体上存在一个广泛的“融合”过程。然而，这不仅仅是一个自上而下的发展，涉及普通法法院实践的传播，或由律师或房东传达外部规则。相反，庄园法院的诉讼人、诉讼人和陪审员在这一过程中发挥了决定性作用。