What laws in the medieval times gave ordinary people more protection?

Answer 1

Common law protected people to a great extent, partly because it recognized an implicit requirement that people keep their vows.

The relationships between lords and serfs were covered by common law and custom, and these protected the serfs by making the obligations mutual. The serfs had manorial obligations to work and provide food, and the lords and obligations to provide homes, farm fields, and protection to the serfs.

There were a number of laws that were enacted in time. While the Magna Carta provided protection mostly to barons and other lords, it guaranteed that people would not be held without being accused of a crime, or imprisoned without a trial.

In the Early Middle Ages, the Kingdoms of the Franks and of Lombardy, and the Carolingian Empire all had laws making it illegal to execute people for crimes that arose from superstitions such as a belief in witchcraft. These had the effect of protecting people from persecution as witches. This changed just as the Renaissance started up.

The were laws against slavery; in England, these came in the reigns of William the Conqueror and his son, Henry I.

The Church had a series of ecclesiastical condemnations of the use of torture, which had the effect of law for a lot of people.

The Church took the position that clerics were to be tried by Church courts rather than secular courts. The definition of a cleric was anyone who could read, and this included such people as university students studying to become physicians and troubadours who had learned to read and write so they could write music. The various governments respected this.