Richard III's Effect on US Laws

We Americans tend to take certain things for granted when dealing with both the court system and economic protections. Of course, any American who has any knowledge of history and law knows that much of American law descends most directly from English law. What many do not know is how one king, Richard III, held a Parliament that gave us, among other things: protection against arbitrary taxation; recourse when defrauded in land deals; the foundation of the modern bail system; and more impartial juries. In 1848, after having put down Buckingham's Rebellion and having quieted the realm somewhat after the upheaval caused by the death of his brother, Edward IV, in 1483, Richard III convened his only Parliament in January 1484. There were several acts that this Parliament enacted at the behest of Richard III, but for my purposes, I will focus on only three or four of these.

First, and probably the most important to anyone who may run afoul of law enforcement, is the granting of bail in most cases. During the Late Middle Ages, people under suspicion of committing a crime were often imprisoned in dank, cold, and ill-lit dungeons. Particularly in larger cities such as York, London, Paris, and the like, these places were wonderful for getting ill. The food was bad, the treatment may be worse, and more than the usual number of rats, lice, fleas, and other vermin abounded. Of course, these were the conditions the general run of prisoner might face. High-born prisoners and suspects, however, often had better conditions in which to await trial. Also, once imprisoned, one's property could be seized even before a trial was held and a conviction gained. Thus, one could be completely innocent and found so by a jury or by the court, and go free with nothing to go home to. Richard III decided that this was a situation that no one should have to face. In his third public statute, Richard III stated that, "every Justice of the Peace may let a prisoner to mainprize. No officer shall seize the goods of a prisoner until he be attainted."¹ What this means is that a "mainprize (man-price)" could be set by which the family and/or friends of the accused may purchase the suspect's temporary freedom from imprisonment, contingent on the accused appearing for trial on the set date. It also meant that the accused's property could not be taken from him until and unless he were "attainted," or found guilty. Thus, people could no longer accuse someone of a crime and have his or her property forfeited unless the accusation proved true in a court of law.

What does this mean for us? It means that if you are arrested on a criminal charge that you cannot legally lose your house, car, life, etc., simply by the act of being arrested. In order for your property to be taken, you must be convicted. If you are not convicted, then those items cannot be seized.

Second, there is the protection from arbitrarily being taxed. During the reign of Edward IV, the king often went about the realm gathering "benevolences" from the nobility. These "grants" from the nobles to the King were often coerced through flattery or by outright demand, and were not required to be repaid by the King. In the 1484 Parliament, Richard III got an act passed that says "The subjects of this realm shall not be charged with any benevolences." ²Richard did later have to resort to forcing loans out of the nobles to battle Henry Tudor's invasion of 1485, but where Richard III's action differed from Edward IV's is that Richard's loans were guaranteed by the crown and would HAVE to be repaid. In fact, when Henry VIII's Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, tried to enforce a benevolence in 1525, there were those in London who protested. The story is told as such in Jeremy Potter's Good King Richard?: 'They were protesting against his demand for a benevolence in contravention of Richard III's statute. "I marvel that you speak of Richard III, which was a usurper and murderer of his own nephews," he reprimanded them. "Although he did evil," they replied, "yet in his time were many good Acts made."' ³

Richard III's act against benevolences is the basis of why neither the governor of a state nor the President of the United States may arbitrarily declare a tax to be imposed, and why all tax increases must be approved by legislatures. Imagine what your tax bill would look like if Richard III hadn't implanted THAT concept into English Law. Of course, we tend to take for granted that no one person in the United States may raise a tax without Congressional or Legislative approval, but we do truly have Richard III to thank for that.

Third, we step back into the criminal justice system again to look at juries. We all know that the jury system is not perfect, and never will be so long as mankind serves on them. Part of the problem with juries prior to 1484 was that the justice calling the jury could, if he so desired, call to jury duty people who would vote a certain way, according to his bent. The people considered most vulnerable to tampering were those who had very little in the way of finances and could expect to gain by ruling in a certain manner on a case. However, our much-maligned king Richard III, in his Parliament of 1484, did, once again, step up with a statute that would improve the quality of jurors *though the property requirements today might seem a little discriminatory*. In this Act, passed by Parliament, Richard declares, "Of what credit and estate these persons must be which shall be impanelled in the sheriff's tourn." There was a certain level of landholding, either as a freeholder or as a shareholder (copyholder) or land. Jurors had to own freehold land worth 20 shillings or copyhold land worth 26 shillings, eight pence.⁴ What this was meant to do was to prevent abuse by sheriffs or lords of the jury system. Innocent men were being convicted and guilty men were being let off, and it was felt that the cause was there being people on juries who would sell their verdict for financial gain. This, Richard III sought to put an end to.

For us, today, the property requirements may not exist, but the concept that a jury should be comprised of one's peers and conducted in a fair and impartial manner, looking at evidence alone, owes much to this statute by Richard III and his Parliament of 1484.

Last, but certainly not least, is the very land which you may own. Imagine, for a moment, if you bought a parcel of land, only to find out that a portion of the land you paid for has also already been sold to someone else by the selling party. That would be fraudulent, would it not, for you to pay, say, $500/acre for a plot of land 100 acres in size (for a total price of $50,000), only to find out later that someone else was sold approximately 30 acres of the 100 acres you paid for. This was happening in England in the time of Richard III, causing confusion as to who owned what and allowing sellers to get double what a parcel of land was worth. There were a couple of statutes Richard III got passed that dealt with the problem. One of these Acts "...took action against...a practice by which a seller of land concealed from the buyer that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else. It was enacted that henceforth every estate feoffment, gift of land, and the like "shall be good to him that it made unto and against the sellers and their heirs." ⁵

What this did was to require that all land sales, gifts, etc., be properly recorded and made public, so that a buyer or receiver of land was sure that the land was, indeed, his, and that no one else could bring a valid claim that the land was theirs by right of purchase. It also simplified English common law and helped to disentangle property questions. Going along with this was another act that said, "Who shall be bound by a fine levied before the justices of the Common Pleas--and proclamations made thereof." This statute "sought to prevent the concealment of property transfers, called "fines", which were made in the Court of Common Pleas, by providing that such fines must be proclaimed by the court and notices of the transaction sent to various officials."⁶ Clearly, it helps to know that property has been transferred from one owner to another before trying to buy from the previous owner, but it also helps in knowing WHO is to pay the property taxes due.

There are several other areas in which Richard III left a legacy of sound legal concept to us in the English-Speaking world, but these four, to me, are the primary contributions to American Law and Justice that he left behind.

^1-6 D.W. DeBogert, The Statutes of Richard III's Parliament 1997 http://home.cogeco.ca/~richardiii/statutes.html