This was the fourth in our sequence of panels on "Law as Culture", designed to offer a Kalamazoo audience an interdisciplinary entrée to the best of current legal history in a form accessible and palatable to non-specialists. We have from the first managed to bring together historians, lawyers (Canon, Roman, European and Englsh Common) and literary scholars with exciting results. Last year (1996) we had a particularly happy mix, we felt, of two young and very promising historians with two rather distinguished literary scholars. We hoped this time to juxtapose literary students of works like Roland and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes that raise knotty questions about landed property and inheritance rights with historians struggling to understand the changing and diverse rules of succession by which land estates devolved in the "real world".

"Property is Theft!" may be one of the first critical slogans about Law that any of us learn. It retains the power to shock, even now. Rights of private property and ownership seem so fundamental to our world as to be almost natural rights. Was this already the case in the Middle Ages? Or did the concepts have to be invented, perhaps more than once? Legal historians certainly do write articles with titles like "The Origins of Property in England".But if the concepts did indeed originate at such or such a date, what did men (and women) do before they existed? Throughout the middle ages men competed for control over "things" -- land, rare and beautiful objects, women and other possessions - and Law or Violence determined who was to succeed. This is surely one of the central facts of medieval culture however defined.

Most Legal Historians privilege land rights. They claim that Real Property questions constitute the molten ore from which substantive legal analysis is forged. Are they right? And, if so, why should Property take precedence over that Justice and Order which most kings swore to uphold from their very coronations? Perhaps the answer lies in that capacity of land simultaneously to spawn a plethora of different (but legal) interests over itself. Perhaps the process of detrmining the priorities between these forces men to invent (or rediscover) the intellectual techniques of legal analysis, precisely in order to kep the peace between claimants. Perhaps not. These are difficult questions, quite weighty enough to be worth arguing out in public.

Historians and linguists may have some lexicographical ground-clearing to do in each other's company. How should one understand substantive uses of the Old English word agend if not to mean something awfully close to "Ownership"? What was the range of meanings attached to Old French dreit, and how far may we simply take it for granted that they refer to landed, that is property right? When does Latin dominus come to mean "Owner" and not "Lord" over land? Such questions ought to concern legal historians; they also affect the sense and interpretation of every manner of medieval text.

And how many significant works of entertainment literature turn on connected questions and assume legal and conceptual knowledge in their audiences for which we moderns must struggle at best? Chansons de geste and romances alike frequently raise questions of property ownership to underpin themes of justice and wrong. Not infrequently, these trespass in gender territory. What rights does a younger sister have against her elder? Where did the customary rule that sisters (and their husbands) should share an inheritance equally "by spindles" come from? Can a forcible abductor or rapist really acquire right in property by seizing and marrying its heiress? Are these literary posers not very close to real-life questions which men actually fought over? One is reminded of the variety of ways in which Normans took English women with "their" lands after 1066. And there is much more scope for studies of the way that property motifs link the literature enjoyed by medieval men and women with the world they lived in. Among other topics that occur to us as interesting in this connection are these:-

• Seizin and Possession as alternatives to Property and Ownership, yet within the same system. A small (?) complication that passed undiscussed in Susan Reynolds' recent, excellent book on Fiefs and Vassals.
• Human beings as Property. The extension of notions of ownership to Serfs, Slaves and, maybe, Women.
• Conquests and Property. The way that conquerors sometimes consciously misrepresented and inflated existing individual rights among the conquered in order to argue for the natives' "freely " to transmit title.
• Peasant Property as the essential prerequisite for family survival and reproduction. In what diverse ways did peasant families manage to ensure their survival from one generation to the next despite the Ownership of their land-holdings by others?
• Matrimonial Property Rights and how they differed from one country to another, eg between England and France. Did women have no control at all over their inheritances while they were married? ·
• Movables as Property. Arguably, possessives implying ownership or something very like it, are found first applied to movable "things" like rings, swords, and only later (?) transferred to landed estates. Is this a widespread, or even a universal pattern? Where do heirlooms and paraphernalia fit in?
• Property Transmission and the deep will of current holders to control this in the future after they are dead and gone. Future and Contingent Interests, and all the hyper-complex conveyancing niceties that grew up in the course of medieval "black-letter" document drafting. Testaments and Wills.
• The case against private property (Property as Theft in the middle ages?). Restraints on full enjoyment and the liberty to use or detroy property at will imposed by morality, kings or law.