I96 THE MANOR COURT
was for the royal charter to " except those things which belong
to the King's crown", or to " except murder, treasure trove, rape
and breach of the peace", or to reserve the King's rights by
some terms or other. Wise lords took care to renew their charters
and to get what definition they could into their terms, for the
lawyers were more and more objecting to the vagueness of the
old terminology, and asking for those powers to be extinguished
which were only claimed thereby. By the thirteenth century,
therefore, a position had been reached in which
the prevailing doctrine seems to have been that sake and soke did
nothing, that toll and team did nothing, that infangenethef and
outfangenethef merely gave the right to hang "hand-having thieves",
"thieves taken with mainour" (cum manuopere\ while the other old
words could not be trusted to do much, though they might serve to
define, and possibly to increase the ordinary powers of a feudal court.1
Doctrine notwithstanding, the powers traditionally attached to
these terms were still being exercised, and the serf on many
thousands of manors was still liable to seizure and punishment
under such quasi-legal rights. Let us take as an example the
question of hanging for theft. What were the rights of any lord
here? Some had, or thought they had, clear rights, in so far that
their charter gave them infangenethef and sometimes outfangene-
thef? the one giving them power to hang a thief caught on their
own lands, the other power to hang him, wherever he was taken.
But there was a proviso—the thief must be taken "hand-having"
or "back-bearing", he must be prosecuted by the loser of the
goods, and farther the coroner must be present.3 Thus far the
law; but we have little need for long search in the records to find
that many lords did not bother overmuch about the details: the
man was a thief, and he had been captured—where and how
seemed of small consequence to the non-legal mind.
Thus we find the Abbot of Crowland is accused and convicted
of hanging a man who stole sixteen eggs, although the theft
occurred outside his liberty;4 the Bishop of Lincoln similarly
arrested five men outside his jurisdiction, and in due course they
1 Pollock and Maitland, Hist. Eng. Law, I, 579.
1 Outfangenethef was much less common, however.
8 Britton, 56,57; Bracton, 137,150-154; Holdsworth, op. cit. n, 102 and in,
3*0 for further references.
* P.Q.W. 519.