PATTERNS OF PUBLIC ACTION

The charter evidence allows us to investigate the relationships between those who exercised political power and the localities they ruled. The transactions recorded in the charters involved not only the transfer of rights over land, but also the definition of relationships between people. In that charters also list a supporting cast of those who witnessed and guaranteed the legitimacy of the transactions they record, they illuminate power relations between the principal actors and the supporting cast. They also supply information about stages and performances: they tell us where and when the public meetings were held, and supply identities for those who presided over, and recorded, these performances. That is, in the charters we can clearly see structured patterns of collective action. In what follows, we will first investigate the stages on which transactions took place, and the relationship between public meetings and the physical and social structure of rural and urban settlement. We will then move on to look at the legal traditions which informed the conduct of these meetings, in particular focusing on the scribes to whom we owe our surviving written records. Next, we will plot the activities of those who sought to rule the localities, uncovering the basis of their power. Finally, we will analyse the relationship between local structures of public action and the initiatives of kings and aristocrats, particularly in the crucial areas of law and violence.

Charter scribes chose to present the transactions they recorded as public actions.