Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

40 Legal History in the Making
it continued to be applied to misdeeds at sea as well as on land; in 1385, for
instance, men of King's Lynn charged with breaking the truce by robbing a
ship from Dundee were required to answer for it on the march. 58 Such a case
posed obvious problems, in that piracy might be committed well away from
the border, to say nothing of the coast. The use of documentary proofs met
the resulting need for authentication of claims for damages and restitution.
Although the growing use of documentation at march days may have owed
something to the example of the warden's chivalric jurisdiction, it must be
said that the principal motive force behind this innovation was political, the
determination on both sides in the last decade of the fourteenth century to
make march sessions work. Bills were presented in advance so that defendants
could be got into court at future sessions, and attempts were made to see that
those sessions were held regularly. In 1398 it was ordered that they should be
held monthly. 59 This may have been too ambitious, but there are examples
from these years of march days being arranged for or held in December,
January and March; 60 the king's gaol delivery justices, by contrast, came north
at the most once a year in August. A similar concern for effectiveness can be
discerned in the order of 1429 that march sessions should continue until all the
complaints made to them had been concluded, and in an apparently new care
for record-keeping, it being laid down that at every march day each side should
have a 'sufficient clerk to indent all things on parchment'. 61 Since the warden's
court, too, had by now come to keep written records, judging by the order of
1434 to a retiring English warden to surrender to his successor 'all the bookes
of the wardein courtes', 62 it would appear that jurisdiction and procedure in
both courts were by now sufficiently well established to make reference to
precedent worthwhile.
The value which was placed on precedent and tradition is discernible in
the preamble to the Scottish code of 1448, gathering together 'the statutis
ordinancis and use of merchis' of the days of Archibald the Grim, who died in
1400. 63 March law came to have its own expertise, with experts to match, men
skilled in the fait de marche. 64 Such was the proficiency at 'days of redresse'
of Sir Robert Umfraville, a man of great experience in border affairs who
died as lord of Redesdale in 1436, that Scots from 'by yonde the Scottyshe
See' were said to have travelled to Berwick to have the benefit of his 'reule
and regymentes'. 65 A warden who was an outsider to the region, like Henry
IV's son the duke of Bedford, was well advised to hearken to 'the wisest of
my council in those parts', Sir Robert Umfraville among them, before taking
58
Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1385-1389, 89.
59
Rymer, Foedera, viii, 54-57.
60
Rotuli Scotie, ii, 3,145; Rymer, Foedera, viii, 17-18; SC8/218, no.10867; E 372/239, m 5.
61
Bain, Calendar of Documents, iv, appendix, no.21.
62
Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, iv, 271.
63
A.P.S.,i, 714-16.
64
British Library, Vespasian F vii, no.119.
65
British Library, Lansdowne MS 204, fo. 220v.