Mangraisat (Mangrai code)

What this is

The Mangraisat (มังรายศาสตร์, "the law of Mangrai") is Lanna's own law-book — the body of customary and royal law ascribed to King Mangrai, founder of Chiang Mai (1296) and of the Lanna kingdom. It is the northern Thai world's home-grown legal tradition: rules for land, debt, marriage, theft, injury and inheritance, framed as the settled custom of the müang rather than as imported scripture. Where the thammasat supplies the cosmic frame of law, the Mangraisat supplies the positive, enforceable code of a specific kingdom.

What the catalogue holds

Twenty-four witnesses carry a Mangrai-law name, all classed as customary law. This is one of the archive's more solid clusters — a genuine, multi-copy legal tradition attested directly in the manuscripts, not merely inferred.

Inference — twenty-four copies is a meaningful survival for a regional law-book, and it signals that the Mangraisat was actively recopied and used, not a single antiquarian relic. A cluster this size is worth a variant study: customary codes drift as they are copied from temple to temple and court to court, so these witnesses very likely disagree in their particulars — exactly the material a content-level comparison could map.

Beyond the catalogue — a king's law and its frame

Tradition — the following is background from the wider Thai–Lanna tradition, not established from these specific manuscripts; treat as orienting, not authoritative.

• A paired legal cosmos. Thai legal thought conventionally splits law into kadi lok (worldly cases — the king's positive law) and kadi tham (cases under the cosmic dhamma-law). The Mangraisat is the _kadi lok_ pole: the practical, royal, enforceable half, whose authority the thammasat half supplies from above.
• Attributed, not authored. As with most premodern law-books, the ascription to Mangrai is a charter of legitimacy rather than a claim of single authorship: the code accretes over generations of judgments and is anchored to the founder-king to give it weight. This is the same legitimating move the foundation-chronicles make.
• Custom written down. Its substance is recognisably customary — compensation tariffs for injury, rules of debt-bondage and land use, marriage and inheritance — the ordinary law of an agrarian müang, given fixed form.

Notes

• A solid catalogue anchor. Unlike the n = 0 want-list entities, the Mangraisat is firmly attested (n = 24). The prose above about its kadi lok / kadi tham framing is clearly-marked tradition, but the cluster itself is hard data.
• Best next move — read within, not just across. Inference — the payoff here is not finding more Mangraisat (there is already a healthy set) but comparing the copies: reading `raw_metadata` and page-content to see how the twenty-four witnesses diverge, and pairing them against the thammasat witnesses to see the two law-poles in one collection.