Testimonies of Temple Lane: memory, perjury, and the landscape in a seventeenth-century West Yorkshire dispute

In the later seventeenth century, a path passing through the Temple Newsam estate in West Yorkshire became the subject of intense and prolonged litigation. The disputants contested whether the path was for the privileged use of the owners and tenants of Temple Newsam or was in fact a common highway. Using the records of this unusually well-recorded dispute, this essay explores how personal memory, exemplified by the testimony of four witnesses accused of perjury, could be used to challenge customary memory in determining the 'truth' of such recollections of the landscape. This analysis refines scholarly approaches to memory in legal disputes. It emphasizes the personal characteristics that could influence witness memory, such as age and time, as well as the ambiguity between misremembering and forgetting. This article further argues that long-standing but non-customary practices related to the landscape needed to be remembered and maintained as much as customary practices.