For the first article of 2025, Dr Simon Payling of our Commons 1461-1504 Section, explores the use of a unique form of medieval defamation law in the early 16th century.
Hugh Oldham (c.1450-1519), bishop of Exeter from 1505, has had a good press from historians. Described by the Exeter MP and chronicler, John Hooker alias Vowell (d. 1601), ‘as a great favourer and a friend both to learning and to learned men’, he was a major benefactor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the foundation of his friend, Richard Foxe, bishop of Winchester. Although Hooker was no advocate of Oldham’s own academic attainments, rather patronisingly remarking that he had ‘more zeal than knowledge and more devotion than learning’, he praised him for his friendliness. A curious action in the court of King’s bench in 1512 gives a rather contrasting picture of the bishop, albeit one, as an ex parte statement, on which little reliance is to be placed. When the bishop’s servant, William Knot, came to Crediton to summon one of the clerks of the diocese, Edward Grigson, to appear in the consistory court, Grigson responded uncharitably, claiming that ‘the Bysshoppe of exet[er] is the most extorcyoner and poller that is in Englond for he hath extorcyoner and polled both me and my Tenauntez and that he hath more poison in that grete fowle bely of hys then all the Bysshoppes in Englond’. A jury found for the bishop, and he was awarded the relatively modest sum of £8 in costs and damages.
The action was an innovative one. Medieval statutes of scandalum magnatum, the first dating from 1275 and reenacted in almost the same terms in 1378 and 1389, had given peers and the King’s great officers protection against the circulation of defamatory rumours about them. The purpose was political: as the 1378 enactment put it, such rumours created ‘Debates and Discords’ whereby, in the hyperbolic language of such statutes, the realm might be brought to ‘quick Subversion and Destruction’. Despite this alarming danger, the statutes were rarely used until the first years of the sixteenth century, when lawyers began to wonder whether their peerage clients might use the offence of scandalum magnatum as a civil plea to win damages against those who could be accused of speaking ill of them. Their first recorded effort proved a failure. In 1495 Sir Richard Croft sought to forward a land dispute with Richard, Lord Beauchamp, by bringing an action under a statute which penalised the fabricating of false deeds. Beauchamp’s response was to counter-sue for damages of £1,000 on the eccentric claim that the allegation he had fabricated false deeds was itself an offence under the scandalum magnatum statute of 1378. This claim, which, if successful, would have given peers extensive protection against litigation, was quickly dismissed by the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Thomas Bryan, who succinctly observed that the statutes of scandalum magnatum were ‘not made to oust men of their legitimate actions’. Yet Bryan’s ruling did not preclude the use of the statutes to sue for scandalous words. There were a series of such actions in the common-law courts in early years of the sixteenth century. The most famous of these was brought by Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in the same year as Odiham’s, against his former servant, Thomas Lucas of Inner Temple, former solicitor-general to Henry VII, for allegedly saying that ‘he sett nott be the Duke two pens’ and that the duke ‘hath no more conseyens than a Dogg’.
It would, however, be mistaken to see these actions solely in terms of the exploitation of aristocratic privilege under arcane medieval statutes, for they can also be seem as part of a more general development. Church courts had enjoyed a monopoly over cases of defamation, and, as in those courts the plaintiff could gain no damages beyond the imposition of penance upon the defendant, this was unsatisfactory. These actions of scandalum magnatum were only one attempt to redress this deficiency, for, at about the same time as they emerged, the common-law began to provide a general remedy with plaintiffs able to sue for damages for reputational damage caused by defamatory words. Scandalum magnatum certainly gave peers a legislative advantage, one that was later to be ruthlessly exploited by the future James II in the early 1680s, but lesser men also had a common-law remedy for slander.
Further reading
Article on Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
J.H. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 1483-1558 (2003), pp. 781-2, 797-8.
J.C. Lassiter, ‘Defamation of Peers: the Rise and Decline of the Action of Scandalum Magnatum’, American Journal of Legal History, xxii (1978), pp. 216-36.