Soru

Passage:
Throughout medieval England, major commercial fairs such as Stourbridge and Bartholomew served as vital nodes for international and domestic commerce, drawing wool merchants from Flanders, vintners from Gascony, and agrarian producers from across the British Isles. Because these itinerant traders needed to conclude their transactions and travel onward before the fair concluded or seasonal transit windows closed, standard judicial venues proved entirely unsuitable for resolving sudden commercial disputes. The common law courts seated at Westminster operated under protracted procedural calendars, requiring formal writs issued by the royal Chancery, rigid pleading rules, and juries summoned exclusively from local property-holding freeholders. In response to these commercial realities, market fairs instituted specialized tribunals known as courts of piepowder—derived from the Anglo-French pieds poudrés ('dusty feet') in reference to the wandering merchants who brought suits before them.

The paramount defining feature of piepowder courts was administrative and adjudicative velocity. Proceedings were initiated without formal written writs, often commencing within hours of an alleged breach or tort and reaching final resolution before the tide turned or the fair’s daily trading bell sounded. Crucially, the bench was not occupied by crown-appointed justices; instead, visiting merchant suitors themselves sat as arbiters of both law and fact. These merchant judges rendered verdicts in accordance with the lex mercatoria (law merchant), an unwritten, transnational body of equitable custom grounded in good faith and commercial necessity, rather than the localized statutes or strict common law doctrines of the English realm.

This pragmatic orientation extended directly to evidentiary and enforcement rules. While royal courts routinely dismissed contractual claims that lacked a formal wax-sealed parchment deed, piepowder courts readily accepted unsealed notched tally sticks, handwritten ledger entries, and the sworn oral testimony of two credible commercial witnesses to establish debts and sale agreements. Furthermore, judgment enforcement was immediate. If an adjudicated debtor failed to produce liquid coin on the spot, the court bailiff was authorized to attach the merchant's booth inventory or distrain pack animals directly, circumventing the protracted execution writs characteristic of royal jurisprudence. However, this autonomous commercial jurisdiction began to erode in the late fifteenth century, when parliamentary statutes under King Edward IV strictly limited piepowder jurisdiction exclusively to contracts executed within the geographic confines of that specific fair during its active operational dates.

According to the passage, how did medieval piepowder courts differ from Westminster common law courts regarding the proof of contractual obligations?