Personal Status Law

The Legal History of Personal Status Law

This section provides an overview of Personal Status Law

Personal or national law in the History of English Law

In different ages and circumstances the pride of a conquering race (such as the Norman Conquest) will show itself in different forms. Now-a-days the victor may regard the conflict as one between civilization and barbarism, or between a high and a low morality, and force his laws upon the vanquished as the best, or the only reasonable laws. Or again, he may deliberately set himself to destroy the nationality of his new subjects, to make them forget their old language and their old laws, because these endanger his supremacy. We see something of this kind when Edward I. thrusts the English laws upon Wales. The Welsh laws were barbarous, barely Christian, and Welshmen must be made into Englishmen.

In older and less politic days all will be otherwise. The conquerors will show their contempt for the conquered by allowing such of them as are not enslaved to live under their old law, which has become a badge of inferiority. The law of the tribe is the birthright of the men of the tribe, and aliens can have no part or lot in it. Perhaps we should be wrong were we to attribute any large measure of either of these sentiments to the generality of the Norman invaders; but probably they stood nearer to the old and tribal than to the modern and political point of view. A scheme of “personal laws” would have seemed to them a natural outcome of the conquest.

The Norman will proudly retain his Norman law and leave English law to the English. We have seen that in matters of procedure William himself favoured some such scheme, and to this idea of personal law may be due what is apt to look like an act of gross iniquity. Roger of Breteuil and Waltheof conspired against William; Waltheof was condemned to death; Roger was punished “according to the law of the Normans” by disherison and perpetual imprisonment. But it was too late for a system of “personal,” that is of racial laws. Even in France law was becoming territorial, and a king of the English who was but duke of the Normans was interested in obliterating a distinction which stood in his way if he was to be king of England.

The rules which mark the distinction between the two races rapidly disappear or are diverted from their original purpose. Murder fines will swell the royal treasure, and early in Henry I.’s reign it is already law that every slain man is a Frenchman unless his Englishry can be proved. Outside the towns, Englishmen seem to have taken to trial by battle very kindly, and already in the first years of the twelfth century William’s ordinance about procedure had lost its force. No doubt William and his sons distrusted the English; even Henry would suffer no Englishman to be abbot or bishop. No doubt too the English were harshly and at times brutally treated; but harshness and brutality are one thing, an attempt to rule them by Norman law would have been another.

The Legal History of Personal Status Law in South and Southeast Asia

This section provides an overview of Personal Status Law in South and Southeast Asia

Resources

See Also

• Legal Biography
• Legal Traditions
• Historical Laws
• History of Law

Further Reading

• Personal Status Law in South and Southeast Asia in the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History (Oxford University Press)
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Political and Legal History (Oxford University Press)
• Personal Status Law in South and Southeast Asia in the Dictionary of Concepts in History, by Harry Ritter
• A Short History of Western Legal Theory, by John Kelly